Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, SIERRAN MEMORIES, by ANNA CATHERINE MARKHAM


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

SIERRAN MEMORIES, by                    
First Line: Sometimes, o california, far away
Last Line: And toil was romance in that fortunate air.
Subject(s): California; Memory


Sometimes, O California, far away,
I softly say your name,
As when one speaks a secret word of prayer
Upon a heart-remembered holiday.
And then, once more, like sudden altar flame,
Burns up the long bright glory down the air
Behind your mountain crests that break the sky—
My earliest memory of time—that flight
Of endless purple peaks that edge the night,
Against ineffable, far, fadeless light.

Again I breathe the music of your name,
A hundred tender memories are stirred!
I see the long dry months of rain deferred
When pines and herbs sift down their quick, keen balms—
The summer months when coppery skies are arched
Above down-dwindling stream, and roadside parched,
Yet rich with dim, evasive hues and tints,
As if 'twere pallette of all April tints.

I hear the delicate first November rain
That kindles blaze of green on hill and plain
And calls the perished flowers to life again.
And lo, the rifted rocks of the ravine
With pencilled, old-gold violets in between,
The manzanita with pink bells aswing
To tell of small tart apples she will bring,
The ceanothus with its white bloom spread
Upon the ground like little crumbs of bread,
The poppy lifting up its warm red gold,
That even in Paradise our hearts will hold.
Nemophilia, mariposa, cyclamen,
Azalea—oh, how well I know just when
My lost ones come, and where the eye may catch
Each thronging clan in its own happy patch.

The old home name! Again my canyon ferns—
And quick, the green-gray lizard's flashing turns!
Again the quail leads out her crested brood
With courtly pomp in canyon solitude;
At night I hear coyote's hollow dare,
Braggart indeed, when only the moon is there.
I thread the thickets where the deer
Come harvesting in the soft brown o'the year.
I wander ancient sheltering parks of oak
Whose acorns wait for bear and Indian folk;
Pass down the harping line
Of shaken, silver-shining spruce and pine;
Or, where the high-born waters poise and lunge,
I thrill as headlong ousels sing and plunge.

O California, just the old dear sound!
Again that one word can the whole world bound!
Thank God for that Sierran realm, a king
Might go his lacking way long envying,
Among illimitable peaks, high-hung
With forests dateless, deathless, ever young.
Ah, child-world bright with hope,
Larger—not safer, sweeter—now my scope
Than when in that old ruined mining camp
I knew the folk at every evening lamp,
Was welcome at each cabin hearth and sill,
Was friends with every grave upon the hill—
That time when men of every land of earth
Walked down our roads as brothers of one birth—
Where nature's glory met the spirit's dare,
And toil was romance in that fortunate air.





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