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| Birches |
| WHEN I see birches bend to left and right | |
| Across the line of straighter darker trees, | |
| I like to think some boy's been swinging them. | |
| But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay. | |
| Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them | 5 |
| Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning | |
| After a rain. They click upon themselves | |
| As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored | |
| As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel. | |
| Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells | 10 |
| Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust— | |
| Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away | |
| You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen. | |
| They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load, | |
| And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed | 15 |
| So low for long, they never right themselves: | |
| You may see their trunks arching in the woods | |
| Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground | |
| Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair | |
| Before them over their heads to dry in the sun. | 20 |
| But I was going to say when Truth broke in | |
| With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm | |
| (Now am I free to be poetical?) | |
| I should prefer to have some boy bend them | |
| As he went out and in to fetch the cows— | 25 |
| Some boy too far from town to learn baseball, | |
| Whose only play was what he found himself, | |
| Summer or winter, and could play alone. | |
| One by one he subdued his father's trees | |
| By riding them down over and over again | 30 |
| Until he took the stiffness out of them, | |
| And not one but hung limp, not one was left | |
| For him to conquer. He learned all there was | |
| To learn about not launching out too soon | |
| And so not carrying the tree away | 35 |
| Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise | |
| To the top branches, climbing carefully | |
| With the same pains you use to fill a cup | |
| Up to the brim, and even above the brim. | |
| Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish, | 40 |
| Kicking his way down through the air to the ground. | |
| So was I once myself a swinger of birches; | |
| And so I dream of going back to be. | |
| It's when I'm weary of considerations, | |
| And life is too much like a pathless wood | 45 |
| Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs | |
| Broken across it, and one eye is weeping | |
| From a twig's having lashed across it open. | |
| I'd like to get away from earth awhile | |
| And then come back to it and begin over. | 50 |
| May no fate wilfully misunderstand me | |
| And half grant what I wish and snatch me away | |
| Not to return. Earth's the right place for love: | |
| I don't know where it's likely to go better. | |
| I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree, | 55 |
| And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk | |
| Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, | |
| But dipped its top and set me down again. | |
| That would be good both going and coming back. | |
| One could do worse than be a swinger of birches. | 60 |
