A flight of snow-birds huddling North,
Etched on the dull gray atmosphere,
Against the dull gray, sullen sky.
Across the wide and frozen mere,
Upon whose blue and languorous breast
The water-lilies dreamed in June,
The wind among the bended reeds
Plays a shrill, high and lonely tune.
Level and brown the meadows stretch
Between the hills of needled fir;
Only bare branches bend and toss,
Where the summer’s blossoms were.
In stubble fields the cattle stand
With drooping heads behind the stacks,
And horses’ feet strike crimson sparks,
As they spring down the frozen tracks.
One maple tree stands gray and cold,
With thin arms to the sky outflung—
Ah, me! It seems but yesterday
That wild birds in its branches sung,
Loved, mated, nested; later, taught
The rapture of their own sweet notes—
A very ravishment of song—
To little tremulous, startled throats.
With mournful cries the wild geese fly,
Hurrying to the red-lipped South.
The only warmth—one crimson rose,
Sweet as a woman’s unkissed mouth.
The bleak tide-lands and grieving gulls,
Where once blue waves and sunlight were . . .
And in my breast a memory,
Where once was that glad heart of her.
A draft of “December,” courtesy of the Ella Higginson Papers, Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, Heritage Resources, Western Washington University, Bellingham Washington.
“December” appears in Ella Higginson’s When the Birds Go North Again (1898).