Poems / by Madison Cawein ; with a foreward by William Dean Howells [electronic text]

FEUD

A MILE of lane, — hedged high with ironweeds And dying daisies, — white with sun, that leads Downward into a wood; through which a stream Steals like a shadow; over which is laid A bridge of logs, worn deep by many a team, Sunk in the tangled shade.

Far off a wood-dove lifts its lonely cry; And in the sleepy silver of the sky A gray hawk wheels no larger than a hand.—From point to point the road grows worse and worse, Until that place is reached where all the land Seems burdened with some curse.

A ragged fence of pickets, warped and sprung,—On which the fragments of a gate are hung, — Divides a hill, the fox and ground-hog haunt, A wilderness of briers; o'er whose tops A battered barn is seen, low-roofed and gaunt, 'Mid fields that know no crops.

Fields over which a path, o'erwhelmed with burrs And ragweeds, noisy with the grasshoppers, 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 advertisement 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.