7/25/2019 Poetry Group5

1/2

!"#$% ' ( )#*+", -"#.,

Gathering LeavesSpades take up leaves

No better than spoons,

And bags full of leaves

Are light as balloons.

I make a great noise

Of rustling all day

Like rabbit and deer

Running away.

But the mountains I raise

Elude my embrace,

Flowing over my arms

And into my face.

I may load and unload

Again and again

Till I fill the whole shed,

And what have I then?

Next to nothing for weight,

And since they grew dullerFrom contact with earth,

Next to nothing for color.

Next to nothing for use.

But a crop is a crop,

And who's to say where

The harvest shall stop?

A Late WalkWhen I go up through the mowing field,

The headless aftermath,

Smooth-laid like thatch with the heavy dew,Half closes the garden path.

And when I come to the garden ground,

7/25/2019 Poetry Group5

2/2

The whir of sober birds

Up from the tangle of withered weeds

Is sadder than any words

A tree beside the wall stands bare,But a leaf that lingered brown,Disturbed, I doubt not, by my thought,

Comes softly rattling down.

I end not far from my going forth

By picking the faded blue

Of the last remaining aster flower

To carry again to you.

Desert PlacesSnow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast

In a field I looked into going past,

And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have itit is theirs.

All animals are smothered in their lairs.

I am too absent-spirited to count;

The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness

Will be more lonely ere it will be less

A blanker whiteness of benighted snow

With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

Between starson stars where no human race is.I have it in me so much nearer home

To scare myself with my own desert places.