Campfires

1. Popple

A river curves like a bended bow, And over it winds of summer lightly blow; Two boys are feeding a flame with bark Of the pungent popple. Hark! They are uttering dreams. "I Will go hunt gold toward the western sky," Says the older lad; "I know it is there, For the rainbow shows just where It is. I'll go camping, and take a pan, And shovel gold, when I'm a man."

2. Sage Brush

The burning day draws near its end, And on the plain a man and his friend Sit feeding an odorous sage-brush fire. A lofty butte like a funeral pyre, With the sun atop, looms high In the cloudless, windless, saffron sky. A snake sleeps under a grease-wood plant; A horned toad snaps at a passing ant; The plain is void as a polar floe, And the limitless sky has a furnace glow. The men are gaunt and shaggy and gray, And their childhood river is far away; The gold still hides at the rainbow's tip, Yet the wanderer speaks with a resolute lip. "I will seek till I find--or till I die," He mutters, and lifts his clenched hand high, And puts behind him love and wife, And the quiet round of a farmer's life.

3. Pine

The dark day ends in a bitter night. The mighty mountains cold, and white, And stern as avarice, still hide their gold Deep in wild cañons fold on fold, Both men are old, and one is grown As gray as the snows around him sown. He hovers over a fire of pine, Spicy and cheering; toward the line Of the towering peaks he lifts his eyes. "I'd rather have a boy with shining hair, To bear my name, than all your share Of earth's red gold," he said; And died, a loveless, childless man, Before the morning light began.