The Plow / Raymond Holden

The Plow

I thought the white patch on the Eastern hill
Was surely snow. I watched it and it stirred,
And even the drifted uplands lost the chill
They had been blowing downward and a bird
Flashed blue and there were others which I heard.

The patch of snow moved with a man behind,
And furrows on the hillside rippled brown.
The Winter went like water from my mind
And the misty April sun came faintly down
And I forgot the road which leads to town.

I was not anything but one desire
To follow in the wake of the billowy blade
With wind and water and my kind of fire –
To cleave the fallow hillside and invade
Young earth and rise up glad and unafraid.

~~

Raymond Holden (1894-1972)

from Granite and Alabaster, 1922

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

Raymond Holden biography

Winter / Raymond Holden

Winter

Drowsily, dreamily, the brown boughs
Mingle and murmur in the breeze
And the little animals drowse
And I wonder they do not freeze,
For nothing moves but is shrill
With the Winter s clinking song
And the snow lies deep and the hill
Gleams where the gusts are strong.
I have come down from the house
Which rests on the reaching snow
To the music of murmuring boughs
In the footless world I know,
And to me the cold is a voice
From earth that would speak to me
And urge me not to rejoice
That I am not beast nor tree;
And to me the warmth of my blood
Is an answer saying, "I hear,"
And so we are understood
And so we have nothing to fear
Though I am a man who dies
And the earth is like dust in the skies.

~~

Raymond Holden (1894-1972)

from Granite and Alabaster, 1922

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

Raymond Holden biography

Snow / Raymond Holden

Snow 

Last night a brooding cloud
Of undecided mist
Lay on the mountain pasture
And the brooks were loud.

Now running waters lie
Faint as far bells
Under a soft white silence
And the birds ask why.

~~

Raymond Holden (1894-1972)

from Granite and Alabaster, 1922

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

Raymond Holden biography

Season's End / Raymond Holden

Season's End

This is the end of the Summer.
This is the end of all.
The sap is running back into earth
And the red leaves shudder and fall.

If I could shake myself down
From the stem that has ceased to flow,
Would there be a cool dark earth to close
Round the things I have come to know?

~~
Raymond Holden (1894-1972)
from Granite and Alabaster, 1922

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

Raymond Holden biography

Snow Rain / Raymond Holden

Snow Rain

I am not one to mind the rain when it comes
Fingering the sinking snow and leaving prints
Of passage hard to tell from the touch of grass
Bent by a rabbit's frenzy or the wind.
Days like to-day there is something very near
Always upon the point of breaking through.
Men of the mountain towns in the milk-train
Quicken the air with tales of leaping deer
And myths of caribou gone fifty years
Come back to visions straining beyond sight.
Something of me goes out into their talk
For I have lain upon the quiet snow
Watching for flying feet and listening
For the murmuring trees to burst with sudden wings,
And I have felt the drops, as they fall now
Come down almost in passion for a world
Made beautiful by the presence of glad men.
Even now I think there is something very close
Ready to sweep like rainfall over me,–
These men, the lingering patterns of the snow,
The wet that alters them, the purple river,
I climb upon these things almost to touch
The beauty of that power I almost know.

~~

Raymond Holden (1894-1972)

from Granite and Alabaster, 1922

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

Raymond Holden biography