Emily Pauline Johnson Poems

I am the one who loved her as my life,
Had watched her grow to sweet young womanhood;
Won the dear privilege to call her wife,
And found the world, because of her, was good.
...

Out of the night and the north;
Savage of breed and of bone,
Shaggy and swift comes the yelping band,
Freighters of fur from the voiceless land
...

All the long day the vapours played
At blindfold in the city streets,
Their elfin fingers caught and stayed
The sunbeams, as they wound their sheets
...

I

It is the blood-hued maple straight and strong,
Voicing abroad its patriotic song.
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Into the rose gold westland, its yellow prairies roll,
World of the bison's freedom, home of the Indian's soul.
Roll out, O seas! in sunlight bathed,
Your plains wind-tossed, and grass enswathed.
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"Wreck and stray and castaway."--SWINBURNE.

Once more adrift.
O'er dappling sea and broad lagoon,
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Halifax sits on her hills by the sea
In the might of her pride,--
Invincible, terrible, beautiful, she
With a sword at her side.
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I may not go to-night to Bethlehem,
Nor follow star-directed ways, nor tread
The paths wherein the shepherds walked, that led
To Christ, and peace, and God's good will to men.
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The autumn afternoon is dying o'er
The quiet western valley where I lie
Beneath the maples on the river shore,
Where tinted leaves, blue waters and fair sky
...

I

Stripped to the waist, his copper-coloured skin
Red from the smouldering heat of hate within,
...