The hem of her skirt makes a path to my gate, Her hat bears the plume of a cloud. Her waist is encircled with spruce and with pine, My neighbor -- so strong and so proud. Her face is deep-furrowed by storms that have blown; She's wrinkled and wind-swept and brown. Though countless the ages that pass o'er her head, She stands there serene, looking down. A mother she is to the birds and the deer, And all the shy life of the wild; Then why does she seem so forbidding to me, An exile, a lost prairie child? I climb to her shoulder, to glimpse once again Horizons she shuts from my sight, But I see only mountains, range upon range -- More mountains, to left and to right. And so when my spirit feels prisoned and sad, And I long for my prairies so dear, I frown at my neighbors, so close and so tall, And wish they did not live so near. But tonight they are outlined, protective and strong, Against the blue, star-sprinkled sky; I think we shall some day be good friends and true, My tall mountain neighbors and I. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...OF A FAIR LADY PLAYING WITH A SNAKE by EDMUND WALLER AGAMEMNON: THE BEACONS by AESCHYLUS SONNET: LOVE'S ETHIC by LOUISA SARAH BEVINGTON PERPLEXED MUSIC by ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING THE LONELY DOG by MARGARET E. BRUNER |