The Judge's house has a splendid porch, with pillars and steps of stone, <br />And the Judge has a lovely flowering hedge that came from across the seas; <br />In the Hales' garage you could put my house and everything I own, <br />And the Hales have a lawn like an emerald and a row of poplar trees. <br /> <br />Now I have only a little house, and only a little lot, <br />And only a few square yards of lawn, with dandelions starred; <br />But when Winter comes, I have something there <br />that the Judge and the Hales have not, <br />And it's better worth having than all their wealth - <br />it's a snowman in the yard. <br /> <br />The Judge's money brings architects to make his mansion fair; <br />The Hales have seven gardeners to make their roses grow; <br />The Judge can get his trees from Spain and France and everywhere, <br />And raise his orchids under glass in the midst of all the snow. <br /> <br />But I have something no architect or gardener ever made, <br />A thing that is shaped by the busy touch of little mittened hands: <br />And the Judge would give up his lonely estate, where the level snow is laid <br />For the tiny house with the trampled yard, <br />the yard where the snowman stands. <br /> <br />They say that after Adam and Eve were driven away in tears <br />To toil and suffer their life-time through, <br />because of the sin they sinned, <br />The Lord made Winter to punish them for half their exiled years, <br />To chill their blood with the snow, and pierce <br />their flesh with the icy wind. <br /> <br />But we who inherit the primal curse, and labour for our bread, <br />Have yet, thank God, the gift of Home, though Eden's gate is barred: <br />And through the Winter's crystal veil, Love's roses blossom red, <br />For him who lives in a house that has a snowman in the yard.<br /><br />Alfred Joyce Kilmer<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-snowman-in-the-yard-2/
