University of Kansas - Jayhawker Yearbook (Lawrence, KS)

Page 27 text:

OCTOBER Two Poems In the Italian quarter, Chicago: He burned at dawn Tonight smoke lies over his street like the hair of an old woman, drifts in dry, straight hanks across the sidewalk like the hair of an old, old woman let down in the morning. And two comer lights glimmer bleakly like the rheumy eyes of a woman; eyes of ancient and grief-struck woman weeping in the darkness . . . He must have been lying when he told them how, lifelong, he KNEW no mother. Kenneth Lewis There are spirits in a camp ire. Oh yes there are. I ' ve oflen seen them there. ]ust sitting and staring into the embers after a day in the open In a camp of lumber-jacks, miners, or forest rangers; Just silting and staring while an old man tells a story Or a young man sings a song. If you wait long enough, you ' re sure to see them there . . . Not when the flames are still hungry, and leap in the smoke- sweet air, ravening. But after they are sufficed a little, returned a little, and the ashes start to glow: Then the spirits come Slyly, shyly from under the birch logs blue-green and purple flickerings The long dead souls of Indian chiefs and trappers, The old scouts, and the pioneers . . . The hard spots gone, MeHou ' ed now by the years and the desert, And replaced by the musk-sweet fragrance Of sage-brush blowing purple, and dawns on the painted moun- tains. Quid of course, just breathing there a moment . . . Then they are gone. This is their one remembrance, their one returning . . . Reincarnate in the sacred thing they loved, they come again. A camp ire is holy to a true woods lover, And these men found divinity about it. I tell you, there are spirits in a camp ire . . . Ghosts of long dead woodsmen, come again. Kenneth Lewis