Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, AT KATHERINE WALTON'S BLUFF ON THE ASHLEY, by KADRA MAYSI


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

AT KATHERINE WALTON'S BLUFF ON THE ASHLEY, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: When it's april on the ashley, 'twixt the tangled cypress
Last Line: Where a phantom pathway passes through the wild plum trees!
Alternate Author Name(s): Simons, Katherine Drayton Mayrant
Subject(s): Spring


When it's April on the Ashley, 'twixt the tangled cypress knees,
Wakes the wonder of the lilies lulled by honey-hungry bees;
And, by Ashley's ebb and flow, to a Land of Long Ago,
There's a little pathway leading through the wild plum trees!

Through the centuries it's leading to the Land of Long Ago;
And, beneath the gypsy jasmine and the drifting dogwood blow,
Is a lilt of long-lost laughter and a silken stepping after
In and out abandoned alleys where the roses used to grow.

Where was box in bordered by-way, terraced line and leveled lawn,
Now the gray fox steals at sunrise and the dun doe feeds her fawn;
And the wraiths of women's words and the ring of riders' swords
Are but faint, fantastic echo on the river wind at dawn.

Are they echo? -- or the Ashley's timeless, twilight tides which tell
Twilit tales of forts whose bastions crumble to coquina shell --
When the long road was astir from White Church to Dorchester,
And the cavaliers of Charleston knew the Bluff's great gateways well?

There are hushed and hunting hoofbeats underneath the mosses gray
Where the druid oaks give entrance on King George's once highway;
But, along their ancient arching where the Tory troops came marching,
Now the only cry of crimson is the cardinal at play!

Yet, I know that Katherine wanders where the tawny trumpet vine
And the jewels of the judas and the shadbush build a shrine --
Where her ghostly gardens spread o'er a mansion of the dead,
And the scented smilax clambers where was trained the eglantine.

In the dreaming dusk of April I have seen her, and in June,
When the sultry saffron orchids seem to smoke beneath the noon,
In the still of slow Septembers (there are trysts that death remembers!),
While the bent, brown broom is silvered by a sailing southern moon!

As of old, she goes to greet him where the vagrant, fragrant breeze
Frets the painted pools of iris underneath the cypress knees!
As of old, he waits for her -- in buff-and-blue, with boot-and-spur --
Where a phantom pathway passes through the wild plum trees!





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