Partner, remember the hills?
The gray, barren, bleak old hills
We knew so well.
Not those gentle, placid slopes that swell
In lazy undulations, lush and green.
No: the real hills, the jagged crests,
The sharp and sheer-cut pinnacles of earth
That stand against the azure -- gaunt, serene,
Careless of all out little worsts and bests,
Our sorrow and our mirth.
Partner, remember the hills?
Those snow-crowned battlements of hills
We loved of old.
They stood so calm, so inscrutable and cold,
Somehow it seemed they never cared at all
For you or me, our fortune or our fall.
And yet we felt their thrall
And, ever and forever to the end,
We shall not cease, my friend,
To hear their call.
Partner, remember the hills?
The grim and massive majesty of hills
That soared so far,
Seeming, at night, to scrape against a star.
Do you remember how we lay at night
And watched the moonshine -- white
Against the peaks all garlanded with snow
While soft and low
The night wind murmured in our ears --
And so
We wrapped our blankets closer, looked again
At those great, shadowy mountaintops, and then
Sank gently to our deep
And quiet sleep.
Partner, remember the hills?
The real hills, the true hills.
Ah! I have tried
To brush the memory of them aside,
To learn to love
Those fresh, green hills that poets carol of.
But the old gray hills of barrenness still clutch
My heart so much
That I forget the beauty all about,
The grass and flowers and such,
And just cry out
To see my naked mountains, shale and snow,
To feel again the hill-wind and to know
The spell that shall not fail.
