Explore "Russell Kincaid" by Edgar Lee Masters on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
In the last spring I ever knew, / In those last days, / I sat in the forsaken orchard / Where beyond fields of greenery shimmered / The hills at Miller's Ford;
Just to muse on the apple tree / With its ruined trunk and blasted branches, / And shoots of green whose delicate blossoms / Were sprinkled over the skeleton tangle, / Never to grow in fruit.
And there was I with my spirit girded / By the flesh half dead, the senses numb, / Yet thinking of youth and the earth in youth --
Such phantom blossoms palely shining / Over the lifeless boughs of Time.
O earth that leaves us ere heaven takes us!
Had I been only a tree to shiver / With dreams of spring and a leafy youth, / Then I had fallen in the cyclone / Which swept me out of the soul's suspense / Where it's neither earth nor heaven.