[New-Poetry] Birthday

[JforJames at aol.com]

Manitoba Childe Roland 
Last night a January wind was ripping at the shingles over our house and  
whistling a wolf song under the eaves. 
I sat in a leather rocker and read to a six-year-old girl the Browning  poem, 
Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. 
And her eyes had the haze of  autumn hills and it was beautiful to her and 
she could not  understand. 
A man is crossing a big prairie, says the poem, and nothing happens-and  he 
goes on and on—and it’s all lonesome and empty and nobody home. 
And he goes on and on—and nothing happens—and he comes on a  horse’s skull, 
dry bones of a dead  horse—and you know more than ever it’s all lonesome and 
empty and nobody  home. 
And the man raises a horn to his lips and blows—he fixes a proud neck and  
forehead toward the empty sky and the empty land—and blows one last  wonder-cry. 
And as the shuttling automatic memory of man clicks off its results  
willy-nilly and inevitable as the snick of  a mouse-trap or the trajectory of a 
42-centimeter projectile, 
I flash to the form of a man to his hips in snow drifts of Manitoba and  
Minnesota—in  the 
Sled derby run form Manitoba—in the sled derby from Winnipeg to  Minneapolis. 
 
He is beaten in the race the first day out of Winnipeg—the lead dog is  eaten 
by four team mates—and the man goes on and on—running while the other  
racers sleep— 
Lost in a blizzard twenty-four hours, repeating a circle of travel hour  
after hour—fighting the dogs who dig holes in the snow and whimper for  sleep—
pushing on—running and walking five-hundred miles to the end of the  race—almost 
a winner—one toe frozen, feet blistered and frost-bitten  
And I know why a thousand young men of the Northwest meet him in the  
finishing mile and yell cheers—I know why judges of the race call him a winner  and 
give him a special prize even though he is a loser. 
I know he kept under his shirt and around his thudding heart amid the  
blizzards of the five hundred miles that one last wonder-cry of Childe  Roland—and I 
told the six-year-old girl all about it. 
And while the January wind was ripping at the shingles and whistling a  wolf 
song under the eaves, her eyes had the haze of autumn hills and it was  
beautiful to her and she could not understand. 
--Carl Sandburg  



**************Start the year off right.  Easy ways to stay in shape.     
http://body.aol.com/fitness/winter-exercise?NCID=aolcmp00300000002489
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