Autumn Twilight / Harry Kemp

Autumn Twilight

Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut

Rich afterglows of Autumn
Fill all the world with light
And elm and oak and maple
Loom up like fire in flight,
And golden is the valley,
And golden is the hill,
And golden is the first star
At twilight's window-sill.

~~
Harry Kemp (1883-1960)
from Chanteys and Ballads, 1920

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada and the United States]

Harry Kemp biography

Tell All the World / Harry Kemp

Tell All the World

Tell all the world that summer's here again
With song and joy; tell them, that they may know
How, on the hillside, in the shining fields
New clumps of violets and daisies grow.

Tell all the world that summer's here again.
That white clouds voyage through a sky so still
With blue tranquillity, it seems to hang
One windless tapestry, from hill to hill.

Tell all the world that summer's here again:
Folk go about so solemnly and slow,
Walking each one his grooved and ordered way —
I fear that, otherwise thev will not know!

~~
Harry Kemp (1883-1960)
from Chanteys and Ballads, 1920

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada and the United States]

Harry Kemp biography

Blind / Harry Kemp

Blind

Cumberland Market, London

The Spring blew trumpets of color;
Her Green sang in my brain —
I heard a blind man groping
"Tap — tap" with his cane;

I pitied him in his blindness;
But can I boast, "I see"?
Perhaps there walks a spirit
Close by, who pities me, —

A spirit who hears me tapping
The five-sensed cane of mind
Amid such unguessed glories —
That I am worse than blind.

~~
Harry Kemp (1883-1960)
From Chanteys and Ballads, 1920

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada and the United States]

Harry Kemp biography

Away from Town / Harry Kemp

Away from Town

High-perched upon a boxcar, I speed, I speed, to-day:
I leave the gaunt gray city some good green miles away,
A terrible dream in granite, a riot of streets and brick,
A frantic nightmare of people until the soul grows sick —
Such is the high gray city with the live green waters round
Oozing up from the ocean, slipping in from the Sound.
I'd put up down in the Bowery for nights in a ten-cent bed
Where the dinky "L" trains thunder and rattle overhead;
I'd traipsed the barren pavements with the pain of frost in my feet;
I'd sidled to hotel kitchens and asked for something to eat.

But when the snow went dripping and the young spring came as one
Who weeps because of the winter, laughs because of the sun,
I thought of a limpid brooklet that bickers thro' reeds all day,
And made a streak for the ferry, and rode across in a dray,
And, dodging into the Erie where they bunt the boxcars round,
I peeled my eye for detectives, and boarded an outward bound.
For you know when a man's been cabined in walls for part of the year,
He longs for a place to stretch in, he hankers for country cheer.

~~
Harry Kemp (1883-1960)
from The Cry of Youth, 1914

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada and the United States]

Harry Kemp biography