Come out, O Little Moccasins, and frolic on the snow! <br />Come out, O tiny beaded feet, and twinkle in the light! <br />I'll play the old Red River reel, you used to love it so: <br />Awake, O Little Moccasins, and dance for me to-night! <br /> <br />Your hair was all a gleamy gold, your eyes a corn-flower blue; <br />Your cheeks were pink as tinted shells, you stepped light as a fawn; <br />Your mouth was like a coral bud, with seed pearls peeping through; <br />As gladdening as Spring you were, as radiant as dawn. <br /> <br />Come out, O Little Moccasins! I'll play so soft and low, <br />The songs you loved, the old heart-songs that in my mem'ry ring; <br />O child, I want to hear you now beside the campfire glow! <br />With all your heart a-throbbing in the simple words you sing. <br /> <br />For there was only you and I, and you were all to me; <br />And round us were the barren lands, but little did we fear; <br />Of all God's happy, happy folks the happiest were we. . . . <br />(Oh, call her, poor old fiddle mine, and maybe she will hear!) <br /> <br />Your mother was a half-breed Cree, but you were white all through; <br />And I, your father was -- but well, that's neither here nor there; <br />I only know, my little Queen, that all my world was you, <br />And now that world can end to-night, and I will never care. <br /> <br />For there's a tiny wooden cross that pricks up through the snow: <br />(Poor Little Moccasins! you're tired, and so you lie at rest.) <br />And there's a grey-haired, weary man beside the campfire glow: <br />(O fiddle mine! the tears to-night are drumming on your breast.)<br /><br />Robert William Service<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/little-moccasins/
