Spring and Summer, Fall and Winter and Spring, <br />After each other drifting, past my window drifting! <br />And I lay so many years watching them drift and counting <br />The years till a terror came in my heart at times, <br />With the feeling that I had become eternal; at last <br />My hundredth year was reached! And still I lay <br />Hearing the tick of the clock, and the low of cattle <br />And the scream of a jay flying through falling leaves! <br />Day after day alone in a room of the house <br />Of a daughter-in-law stricken with age and gray. <br />And by night, or looking out of the window by day <br />My thought ran back, it seemed, through infinite time <br />To North Carolina and all my girlhood days, <br />And John, my John, away to the war with the British, <br />And all the children, the deaths, and all the sorrows. <br />And that stretch of years like a prairie in Illinois <br />Through which great figures passed like hurrying horsemen, <br />Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Webster, Clay. <br />O beautiful young republic for whom my John and I <br />Gave all of our strength and love! <br />And O my John! <br />Why, when I lay so helpless in bed for years, <br />Praying for you to come, was your coming delayed? <br />Seeing that with a cry of rapture, like that I uttered <br />When you found me in old Virginia after the war, <br />I cried when I beheld you there by the bed, <br />As the sun stood low in the west growing smaller and fainter <br />In the light of your face!<br /><br />Edgar Lee Masters<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/rebecca-wasson/
