Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, LIFE ON THE LAKES: ORDERS, by ELIZABETH SEWELL HILL


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

LIFE ON THE LAKES: ORDERS, by                    
First Line: It is in or out as the orders send
Last Line: To the weathered wharves of the grey old town.
Subject(s): City & Town Life; Memory


It is in or out as the orders send,
Or hearthfires lure or risks attend.

The orders had come to the grey old town
From the upper camps with their corded browns
On the bare north hills where the blue lights drown—
By shanty and woodcamp winding down,
With door agape, while the broken pump
Leans out thro' the clearing's ragged clumps
Growing rank round the rotting and charred old stumps;
While the blossoms and berries and briers spread
From the sunny side of the fallen dead;
On down the sunny slopes where red
The sumach glows in the late sunshine
With the sassafras, while the wild grapevine
Bells down each sapling. A gaunt old pine
Lifts high, overlooked, on the blue skyline.
From bushes and bracken and scanty sod
Blaze black-eyed-Susans and goldenrod.

The woodroad curves thro' the arching green,
Then skirts round the edge of the big ravine,
Where hemlock and maple and oak still vie
In their upward lift to the bending sky;
Where the great grey boles of the taller beech
Gleam bare thro' the forest's twilight reach
In cathedral hush, while mists of green
Peep under and over and out between.

Then turning, we dip to the bridge and crawl
Thro' the bedded sands of the creek that sprawls
Round rushy clumps while the waters call;
Past the swamp's rank growth to the wooded wall
Of the creek's steep side where the needles fall.

Then up and out where the ploughed fields spread,
The corn's shocked gold, and the orchard's red;
And the bank stands sheer where the hummocks swell,
Starred with fall daisy and immortelle.

And so on down to the river's mouth
With its jam of logs, while, working south,
The great rafts swim as the cables reel
With the convoy passing—the smothered keel
Dipping low up the bay in the dying foam
To its berth in the slip, and so, safe home.

Thus the orders had come to the grey old town;
By copsewood and clearing winding down—
The loose-swung wires swinging overhead
To the wayside cross leading on ahead—
Past the shanty dumb and the woodcamp dead,
The bridge, and the ploughed fields and so on down
To the weathered wharves of the grey old town.





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