Poems by Madison Julius Cawein Part 20

A secret signal; a foot's rough tramp; A knock at the door; a lifted lamp.

An oath; a scuffle; a ring of masks; A voice that answers a voice that asks.

A group of shadows; the moon's red fleck; A running noose and a man's bared neck.

A word, a curse, and a shape that swings; The lonely night and a bat's black wings.

At the moon's down-going let it be On the quarry hill with its one gnarled tree.

THE PARTING

She pa.s.sed the thorn-trees, whose gaunt branches tossed Their spider-shadows round her; and the breeze, Beneath the ashen moon, was full of frost, And mouthed and mumbled to the sickly trees, Like some starved hag who sees her children freeze.

Dry-eyed she waited by the sycamore.

Some stars made misty blotches in the sky.

And all the wretched willows on the sh.o.r.e Looked faded as a jaundiced cheek or eye.

She felt their pity and could only sigh.

And then his skiff ground on the river rocks.

Whistling he came into the shadow made By that dead tree. He kissed her dark brown locks; And round her form his eager arms were laid.

Pa.s.sive she stood, her secret unbetrayed.

And then she spoke, while still his greeting kiss Ached in her hair. She did not dare to lift Her eyes to his--her anguished eyes to his, While tears smote crystal in her throat. One rift Of weakness humored might set all adrift.

Fields over which a path, overwhelmed with burrs And ragweeds, noisy with the gra.s.shoppers, Leads,--lost, irresolute as paths the cows Wear through the woods,--unto a woodshed; then, With wrecks of windows, to a huddled house, Where men have murdered men.

A house, whose tottering chimney, clay and rock, Is seamed and crannied; whose lame door and lock Are bullet-bored; around which, there and here, Are sinister stains.--One dreads to look around.-- The place seems thinking of that time of fear And dares not breathe a sound.

Within is emptiness: The sunlight falls On faded journals papering the walls; On advertis.e.m.e.nt chromos, torn with time, Around a hearth where wasps and spiders build.-- The house is dead: meseems that night of crime It, too, was shot and killed.

KU KLUX

We have sent him seeds of the melon's core, And nailed a warning upon his door: By the Ku Klux laws we can do no more.

Down in the hollow, 'mid crib and stack, The roof of his low-porched house looms black; Not a line of light at the door-sill's crack.

Yet arm and mount! and mask and ride!

The hounds can sense though the fox may hide!

And for a word too much men oft have died.

The clouds blow heavy toward the moon.

The edge of the storm will reach it soon.

The kildee cries and the lonesome loon.

The clouds shall flush with a wilder glare Than the lightning makes with its angled flare, When the Ku Klux verdict is given there.

In the pause of the thunder rolling low, A rifle's answer--who shall know From the wind's fierce hurl and the rain's black blow?

Only the signature, written grim At the end of the message brought to him-- A hempen rope and a twisted limb.

So arm and mount! and mask and ride!

The hounds can sense though the fox may hide!-- For a word too much men oft have died.

EIDOLONS

The white moth-mullein brushed its slim Cool, faery flowers against his knee; In places where the way lay dim The branches, arching suddenly, Made tomblike mystery for him.

The wild-rose and the elder, drenched With rain, made pale a misty place,-- From which, as from a ghost, he blenched; He walking with averted face, And lips in desolation clenched.

For far within the forest,--where Weird shadows stood like phantom men, And where the ground-hog dug its lair, The she-fox whelped and had her den,-- The thing kept calling, buried there.

One dead trunk, like a ruined tower, Dark-green with toppling trailers, shoved Its wild wreck o'er the bush; one bower Looked like a dead man, capped and gloved, The one who haunted him each hour.

Now at his side he heard it: thin As echoes of a thought that speaks To conscience. Listening with his chin Upon his palm, against his cheeks He felt the moon's white finger win.

And now the voice was still: and lo, With eyes that stared on naught but night, He saw?--what none on earth shall know!-- Was it the face that far from sight Had lain here, buried long ago?

But men who found him,--thither led By the wild fox,--within that place Read in his stony eyes, 'tis said, The thing he saw there, face to face, The thing that left him staring dead.

THE MAN HUNT

The woods stretch deep to the mountain side, And the brush is wild where a man may hide.

They have brought the bloodhounds up again To the roadside rock where they found the slain.

They have brought the bloodhounds up, and they Have taken the trail to the mountain way.

Three times they circled the trail and crossed; And thrice they found it and thrice they lost.

Now straight through the trees and the underbrush They follow the scent through the forest's hush.

And their deep-mouthed bay is a pulse of fear In the heart of the wood that the man must hear.

The man who crouches among the trees From the stern-faced men who follow these.

A huddle of rocks that the ooze has mossed, And the trail of the hunted again is lost.

An upturned pebble; a bit of ground A heel has trampled--the trail is found.

And the woods re-echo the bloodhounds' bay As again they take to the mountain way.