In the yard, by the house of boxes,
I lay in the ditch with my bow;
And the train’s long mourning whistle
Wailed from the valley below
Till the sound of my rabbit gnawing
Was the grasses’ tickling shadow,
And I lay dazed in my halo
Of sunlight, a napping echo.
I saw through rainbow lashes
The barred and melting gaze
Of my far-raiding captors.
(The dappled mustangs graze
By the quills of the milky leggings.)
After some feverish days
They smile, and the numbing laces
Are cut from my wrists with praise.
When I woke the rabbit was gnawing
His great, slow, ragged bites
From the wood of the wired-in hutches.
And dusk had greyed the white
Leghorns hunched on the roosts of their run.
The train mourned below
For the captives—a thinning echo. . . .
It all comes back to me now.