Poems by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

Pictures by Kenneth Hartley

The Hill People.

Their steps are light and exceedingly fleet:

They pass me by in the hurrying street.

I pause to look at a window’s show—

From the white-flecked alp the hill winds blow—

And all at once it has passed me there,

Lilting back to the land of the air,

Back to the land of the great white stills:

Is it only the wind that comes down from the hills?

———

Was it Pikes Peak Pixie or Cheyenne Shee

That whispered a gay little rhyme to me?

Or a gnome that lives in the heart of a stone

And dances at dawn around Cameron’s Cone?

Did the haunting laugh of the Maid of the Corn,

An Aztec memory trill on the morn?

Or soft did the Navajo Shell-Woman speak

As she passed with a hymn for the great white peak?

  P 1/7 next