New poems / by Madison Cawein [electronic text]

THE HERB-GATHERER

A GREY, bald hillside, bristling here and there With leprous-looking grass, that, knobbed with stones, Slopes to a valley where a wild stream moans, And every bush seems tortured to despair And shows its teeth of thorns as if to tear All things to pieces: where the skull and bones Of some dead beast protrude, like visible groans, From one bleak place the winter rains washed bare. Amid the desolation, in decay, Like some half-rotted fungus, grey as slag, A hut of lichened logs; and near it, old, Unspeakably old, a man, the colour of clay, Sorting damp roots and herbs into a bag With trembling hands purple and stiff with cold.