Hillsboro People/Vermont
VERMONT
Wide and shallow in the cowslip marshes
Floods the freshet of the April snow.
Late drifts linger in the hemlock gorges,
Through the brakes and mosses trickling slow
Where the Mayflower,
Where the painted trillium, leaf and blow.
Foliaged deep, the cool midsummer maples
Shade the porches of the long white street;
Trailing wide, Olympian elms lean over
Tiny churches where the highroads meet.
Fields of fireflies
Wheel all night like stars among the wheat.
Blaze the mountains in the windless autumn
Frost-clear, blue-nooned, apple-ripening days;
Faintly fragrant in the farther valleys
Smoke of many bonfires swells the haze;
Fair-bound cattle
Plod with lowing up the meadowy ways.
Roaring snows down-sweeping from the uplands
Bury the still valleys, drift them deep.
Low along the mountain, lake-blue shadows,
Sea-blue shadows in the hollows sleep.
High above them
Blinding crystal is the sunlit steep.