You mought be out on de chain-gang, bustin’ up rocks,
Or agin, you mought be enlisted.” “Huh?” said Spade.
“Sho’, dey’s gwine to enlist us all when we finish dis road.
All excep’ me. I got bad sight in my eyes
And dey knows about it.” “Dey kain’t enlist me,” said Spade.
“I ain’t honin’ to go an’ fight in no white-folks war,
I ain’t bust loose into Freedom’s land fer dat,
All I want is a chance to git me a gal and a mule.
If I’se free, how kin dey enlist me, lessen I want?”
“You watch ’em,” said Ginger. They worked on for a time.
The foreman stood on the bank and watched them work,
Now and then he drank from a bottle. Spade felt hungry.
Autumn is filling his harvest-bins
With red and yellow grain,
Fire begins and frost begins
And the floors are cold again.
Summer went when the crop was sold,
Summer is piled away,
Dry as a faded marigold
In the dry, long-gathered hay.
It is time to walk to the cider-mill
Through air like apple wine
And watch the moon rise over the hill,
Stinging and hard and fine.
It is time to cover your seed-pods deep
And let them wait and be warm,
It is time to sleep the heavy sleep
That does not wake for the storm.
Winter walks from the green, streaked West
With a bag of Northern Spies,
The skins are red as a robin’s breast,
The honey chill as the skies.
Melora Vilas walked in the woods that autumn
And heard the dry leaves crackle under her feet,
Feeling, below the leaves, the blunt heavy earth.
“It’s getting-in time,” she thought. “It’s getting-in time,
Time to put things in barns and sit by the stove,
Time to watch the long snow and remember your lover.
“He isn’t dead. I know that he isn’t dead.
Maybe they’ve changed his body into a tree,
Maybe they’ve changed his body into a cloud
Or something that sleeps through the Winter. But I’ll remember.
I’ll sleep through the Winter, too. We all sleep then
And when the Spring freshet drums in the narrow brooks
And fills them with a fresh water, they’ll let him come
Out of the cloud and the tree and the Winter-sleep.
The Winter falls and we lie like beleaguered stones
In the black, cramped ground. And then you wake in the morning
And the air’s got soft and you plant the narrow-edged seeds,
They grow all Summer and now we’ve put them in barns
To sleep again for a while.
I am the seed and the husk. I have sown and reaped.
My heart is a barn full of grain that my work has harvested.
My body holds the ripe grain. I can wait my time.”
She walked on farther and came to the lip of the spring,
The brown leaves drifted the water. She watched them drift.
“I am satisfied,” she thought, “I am satisfied.
I can wait my time in spite of Mom being sad
And Pop looking fierce and sad when he sees me walk
So heavy and knows I’ll have to walk heavier still
Before my time comes. I’m sorry to make them sad,
I’m sorry I did a bad thing if it was a bad thing;
But I’m satisfied. We cut the heart on the tree.
I’ve got my half of the dime and he’s got his,
He’ll come back when Winter’s over or else I’ll find him,
When you can push up the windows, when the new colts
Come out in the Spring, when the snake sheds his winter coat,
When the old, shed coat of Winter lies on the ground
Grey as wasp-paper under the green, slow rain,
When the big barn door rolls open.
I was worried to death at first and I couldn’t tell.
But as soon as I knew what it was—it was different then—
It made things all right. I can’t tell why it did that.”
She awkwardly stooped and put her hand on the ground,
Under the brittle leaves the soil was alive,
Torn with its harvest, turned on its side toward sleep,
But stripped for battle, too, for the unending
Battle with Winters till the Spring is born
Like a tight green leaf uncurling, so slightly, so gently,
Out of the husk of ice and the blank, white snows.
The wind moved over it, blowing the leaves away,
Leaving the bare, indomitable breast.
She felt a wind move over her heavy body,
Stripping it clean for war. She felt the blind-featured
Mystery move, the harmonics of the quick grain,
The battle and the awakening for battle,
And the salt taste of peace.
A flight of geese passed by in a narrow V,
Honking their cry. That cry was stuck in her heart
Like a bright knife. She could have laughed or wept
Because of that cry flung down from a moving wing,
But she stood silent. She had touched the life in the ground.
Love came by from the riversmoke,
When the leaves were fresh on the tree,
But I cut my heart on the blackjack oak
Before they fell on me.
The leaves are green in the early Spring,
They are brown as linsey now,
I did not ask for a wedding-ring
From the wind in the bending bough.
Fall lightly, lightly, leaves of the wild,
Fall lightly on my care,
I am not the first to go with child
Because of the blowing air.
I am not the first nor yet the last
To watch a goosefeather sky,
And wonder what will come of the blast
And the name to call it by.
Snow down, snow down, you whitefeather bird,
Snow down, you winter storm,
Where the good girls sleep with a gospel word
To keep their honor warm.
The good girls sleep in their modesty,
The bad girls sleep in their shame,
But I must sleep in the hollow tree
Till my child can have a name.
I will not ask for the wheel and thread
To spin the labor plain,
Or the scissors hidden under the bed
To cut the bearing-pain.
I will not ask for the prayer in church
Or the preacher saying the prayer,
But I will ask the shivering birch
To hold its arms in the air.
Cold and cold and cold
