Poems (Odom)/The Little Brown Curl
THE LITTLE BROWN CURL.
A MEMORY OF MY OLD FRIEND, DR. JOHN R. HICKS OF VICKSBURG.
A quaint old box with a lid of blue, All faded and worn with age,A soft little curl of a brownish hue, A yellow and half-written page.
The letters, with never a pause nor dot, In a school-boy's hand are cast;The lines and the curl I may hold to-day, But the love of the boy is past.
It faded away with our childish dreams, Dying out like the morning mist;And I look with a smile on the silken curl That once I have tenderly kissed.
One night in the summer so long ago We played by the parlor door,And the moonlight fell like a silver veil Spreading itself on the floor.
And the children ran on the gravelled walk, At play in their noisy glee,But the maddest, merriest one just then Was nothing to John and me.
For he was a stately boy of twelve, And I was not quite eleven;We thought, as we sat in the parlor door, We had found the gate to heaven.
That night when I lay on my snowy bed, Like many a foolish girlI kissed and held to my little heart This letter and silken curl.
I slept and dreamed of the time when I Should wake to a fairy life;And sleeping blushed when I thought that John Had called me his little wife.
I have loved since then with a woman's heart, Have known all a woman's bliss,But never a dream of the after-life Was purer or sweeter than this.
The years went by with the silver feet, And often I laughed, with John,Of the vows we made by the parlor door, When the moon and stars looked on.
Ah! boyish vows are broken and lost, And a girl's first dream will end;But I dearly loved his beautiful wife, While he was my husband's friend.
When last I went to my childhood's home, Far over the bounding wave,I missed my friend, for the violets grew And blossomed over his grave.
To-day as I opened the old blue box, And looked on the soft brown curl,And read of the love John felt for me When I was a little girl,
There came in my heart a throb of pain, And my eyes grew moist with tears,For the childish love, and the dear, dead friend, And the long-lost buried years.