Hazel Rawson Cades

SHE will bear him children with straight backs and sturdy limbs,

Clear-eyed children with untroubled minds.

Mine would have been brown things, questioners—

With little hoofs, I think;

Lovers of wind and rain

And twisted brambly paths over the hills.

But he was afraid—afraid of the brown-hoofed ones;

And more afraid that sometimes,

As we grew old together,

I would slip away from him to the hills;

Where he—because of gout, or girth, or civic dignity—

Could not come after.

He need not have been troubled:

Long before that I should have lost the feel of brambles.