Across the Meadowlands

If I might walk a piece with you across the meadowlands -

And feel again within my clasp the coolness of your hand,

And help you at the stepping-stones to get across the stream,

If I might watch you sit beside the dover fields and dream

With your eyes on the distance, bluer than the deepest sky,

If I might hear the humming honeybees of that July

Away back yonder in the past, when I walked out with you

Where clover bloomed and where the brook reflected heaven'$

blue.

The clover meadow and the shade of the wild cherry tree;~

The butterfly on lazy wings, the homing honeybee,

The blue sky not one-half so deep and not one-half so blue;

And not one-half so tender as the eyes I gazed into

When I walked just a piece with you across the meadowlands,

And when I felt within my clasp the coolness of your hands,

And when at last I stood alone with you beside the bars

And framed a wish to celebrate the coming of the stars.

The days I walked a piece with you the ways were carpeted

With blue forgetmenots, but, oh, my eyes were straight ahead

And my thoughts raced afar from you, and raced afar from me

And builded glory-castles in the days that were to be,

So that when I walked out with you across the meadowlands

I did not feel the sweetness and the coolness of your hands,

I did not see the blueness of your tender eyes at all,

I did not hear the honeybee nor mark the mocker's call.

And all the castles I have built are nothing much, in truth;

I long to walk a piece with you, and walk a piece with youth!

I turn me from the castles built to far-off meadowlands,

And in my hands are memories of cool and clasping hands,

And in my eyes are memories of blue and tender eyes

With more of glory in their deeps than touched the summer skies,

And in my heart are memories of ways of long ago,

And knowledge of a something which I did not dream or know.

Poems for Declamation Table of Content