Mary Austin
Mary Austin Poems
I know very well what I'd rather be
If I didn't always have to be me!
I'd rather be an owl,
A downy feathered owl,
...
CREAM-CUPS, butter-cups,
Dandelions and sedges;
Blackbirds in the poplar row,
...
W HEN misty, misty mornings come,
When wild geese low are flying,
And down along the reedy marsh
...
WHENEVER the days are cool and clear,
The sand-hill crane goes walking
Across the field by the flashing weir,
Slowly, solemnly stalking.
...
WE have set the White Christ forward, we have bid the old gods go,
We be Christians, Christian peoples, singing psalm tunes staid and slow.
...
HEAR now a tale of the deer-star,
Tale of the days agone,
When a youth rose up for the hunting
In the bluish light of dawn --
...
FAIR is the white star of twilight,
and the sky clearer
At the day's end;
But she is fairer, and she is dearer.
...
COME not near my songs,
You who are not my lover,
Lest from that ambush
...
WHEN the catkin's on the willow
And the tassel on the birch,
The wild bees from the having rocks
Begin their honey search.
...
GO thy way in comeliness!
Strong sun across the sod doth make
Such quickening as thy countenance.
...
BLUE-EYED grass in the meadow
And yarrow-blooms on the hill,
Cattails that rustle and whisper,
...
This is the tale that the howlers tell
At the end of the hunting weather,
When the quick rain rills
On the bare, burnt hills,
...
THE red deer loves the chaparral,
The hawk the wind-rocked pine;
The ouzel haunts the rills that race
...
THE sea-sand drifts about my feet and whitens on the dunes,
While, still complaining to the sky, the rocking water croons;
...
Oh, the Shepherds in Judea,
They are pacing to and fro,
For the air grows chill at twilight
And the weanling lambs are slow!
...
Someday I shall go West,
Having won all time to love it in, at last,
Too still to boast.
...
FAR from the northward, from the cloven ridges,
Pine-girt, deep-drifted with bewildering snows,
By ice-plowed gorge, the leaping river bridges,
...
MEDICINE me,
O Friend-of-the-Soul-of-Man,
With purging waters!
For my soul festers
...
WHEN south winds smelt of earth and brooks ran clear,
I made a little pipe of oaten straw,
From which of old the shepherd lads could draw --
...
Mary Austin Biography
Mary Hunter Austin (September 9, 1868 – August 13, 1934) was an American writer. One of the early nature writers of the American Southwest, her classic The Land of Little Rain (1903) describes the fauna, flora and people – as well as evoking the mysticism and spirituality – of the region between the High Sierras and the Mojave Desert of southern California. Austin was born Mary Hunter on September 9, 1868 in Carlinville, Illinois (the fourth of six children) to George and Susannah (Graham) Hunter. She graduated from Blackburn College in 1888. Her family moved to California in the same year and established a homestead in the San Joaquin Valley. Mary married Stafford Wallace Austin on May 18, 1891 in Bakersfield, California. He was from Hawaii and a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. For 17 years Austin made a special study of Indian life in the Mojave Desert, and her publications set forth the intimate knowledge she thus acquired. She was a prolific novelist, poet, critic, and playwright, as well as an early feminist and defender of Native American and Spanish-American rights. She is best known for her tribute to the deserts of the American Southwest, The Land of Little Rain (1903). Her play, The Arrowmaker, dealing with Indian life, was produced at the New Theatre, (New York) in 1911. Austin and her husband were involved in the local California Water Wars, in which the water of Owens Valley was eventually drained to supply Los Angeles. When their battle was lost, he moved to Death Valley, California, and she moved to Carmel, California. There, she was part of a social circle that included Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, and George Sterling and was one of the founders of the Forest Theater. Austin died August 13, 1934 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Mount Mary Austin, in the Sierra Nevada, was named in her honor. It is located 8.5 miles west of her long time home in Independence, California.)
The Best Poem Of Mary Austin
Rathers
I know very well what I'd rather be
If I didn't always have to be me!
I'd rather be an owl,
A downy feathered owl,
A wink-ity, blink-ity, yellow-eyed owl
In a hole in a hollow tree.
I'd take my dinner in chipmunk town,
And wouldn't I gobble the field mice down,
If I were a wink-ity, blink-ity owl,
And didn't always have to be me!
I know very well what I'd like to do
If I didn't have to do what I do!
I'd go and be a woodpecker,
A rap-ity, tap-ity, red-headed woodpecker
In the top of a tall old tree.
And I'd never take a look
At a lesson or a book,
And I'd scold like a pirate on the sea,
If I only had to do what I like to do,
And didn't always have to be me!
Or else I'd be an antelope,
A pronghorned antelope,
With lots of other antelope
Skimming like a cloud on a wire-grass plian.
A bounding, bouncing antelope,
You'd never get me back to my desk again!
Or I might be a puma,
A singe-colored puma,
A slinking, sly-foot puma
As fierce as fierce could be!
And I'd wait by the waterholes where antelope drink
In the cool of the morning
And I do
not
think
That ever any antelope could get away from me.
But if I were a hunter,
A red Indian hunter -
I'd like to be a hunter, -
I'd have a bow made of juniper wood
From a lightning-blasted tree,
And I'd creep and I'd creep on that puma asleep
A flint tipped arrow,
An eagle feathered arrow,
For a puma kills calves and a puma kills sheep,
And he'd never eat any more antelope
If he once met up with me!
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