Communings
With Nature
Autumn Winds
By Grace Aguilar
Sad is thy
voice, oh! moaning wind;
Whence comes thy wailing tone?
Mourn’st the wreck thy pinions find—
Leaves brown, and bare, and strewn?
That forest boughs are dark and drear,—
That loveliest shrubs are bow’d and sear,
And mother Earth a robe must wear
Of bliss o’erthrown?
Weep’st
thou the buds, whose glistening bloom
Hath passed away from earth?
That Nature is but one wide tomb
O’er loveliness and mirth?
Mourn’st thou sweet Summer’s early flight—
That storm hath rush’d from mount and height,
To whelm the flowers whose sunny light
Smil’d o’er his birth?
Weepest
thou the laughing sunshine gone,
The softly gleaming sky?—
Night’s glistening dews—the starry zone—
And the sweet scents floating by?
Oh! check thy moanings; but awhile
Is hid sweet Nature’s glowing smile
’Twill wake again, and Earth beguile
Of tear and sigh!
The
moaning blast rush’d by, but as it pass’d
Methought a low sweet voice the answer cast—
“I mourn
not for the glory
A brief while pass’d away;
That lovely things and beautiful
Are tainted with decay.
“I mourn
not for the flowers
Whose lovely smiles are dead;
That summer’s sunlit hours,
All phantom-like, are fled.
But there
are lovelier blossoms,
Now shrin’d in love and mirth,
In whose rich smiles and silver laugh
No dream of wo hath birth.
“I
see—I see them passing;
I mark the shrouding pall—
The loving and the blessing—
Like leaves, I see them fall!
“I weep
the broken-hearted—
The spirits left to moan
The bounding hope—the trusting Iove—
The springy joyance flown.
“I weep
the young hopes blighted,
That may not bloom again;
The stars that love hath lighted,
Quench’d ‘neath pale sorrow’s rain.
“I mourn
the heavy anguish
That winter’s cold touch brings;
The fireless hearth—the scanty board—
The pangs that hunger wrings.
“The
famish’d babe and mother—
The strong man chafed to sin.
Oh! help’d ye one another,
Such woes had never been!”