Lines under Duress On a broiling Day
When from a week of heated strife –
The desperate round of daily life
We turn to seek relief and ease
Where sights and scents of Nature please
Brief hours of rest and peace to feel –
The balm industry’s scars to heal
We greet the waking summer sun
And stir, lest precious minutes run.
But the joys of the sun are haply these:-
The midges nip on tender knees;
Vagrant wasps on the wandering wing
In search of unclothed arms to sting;
The bee in quest of honey sweet
Just flecks the neck with puncture neat
The tiny things that crawl and creep
On human skin make lighter leap:
And myriad life in earth and air
Make summer more than one can bear.
The lightsome play of solar rays
On skin yet white from sunless days
May from refreshing caress turn
Into a fire of torturing burn
The winding lane one follows far
Are steeped in dust by every car.
Illusion is a mental sense
Banished by experience;
And summer joys seen from afar
Are thus seen where they cannot mar
‘Tis good to dream of ‘Flaming June’
And hold the dream at Winter’s noon
E’en while I sit to make my song
I fear I dare not sit for long
With mustering force the pesterous clan
Precipitate the Flight of Man. Hoghton Bottoms, June 1934
Eastertide
When Easter comes the highway hums
(Like it always hums when Easter comes)
The whole long day with a rare array
Of miscellaneous roadsters gay
All of them off on holiday!
Brief liberty – a world set free –
A moving scene of pageantry
The land is gay in spring array
From town and city, bent on play
The world is making holiday!
There’s a tandem old with its riders bold
(What tales that tandem could unfold)
And the riders gray, whose youthful day
Is like their tandem’s, year’s away,
Both of them off on a holiday!
And the youngster green – perhaps over keen
Each of them perched on an aged machine
As forth they sway in a wayward way
From peep o’dawn till the end of day
All of them off on a holiday!
Oh, what delight from morn till night
Be Easter dull or be it bright
And what care they for another day –
Today will soon be yesterday –
Today they are all on holiday! Easter 1934
