Sandburg, Helga

English

University of New Mexico

New Mexico Quarterly
Volume 29 | Issue 4 Article 8
1959
On the Sixth Day of April This Year
Helga Sandburg
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Recommended Citation
Sandburg, Helga. "On the Sixth Day of April This Year." New Mexico Quarterly 29, 4 (1959). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmq/
vol29/iss4/8
ON THE SIXTH DAY OF APRIL THIS YEAR
On the sixth day of April this year
I picked a blade of grass
From a yard in Denver,
Colorado. It was
A dull and dusted spear,
Sprouted in soot, fed by fear
Of trampflng feet;
Not knowing sun at all ora clear
Swept look that sky can have.
And back behind the cave
The city made I could hear
Mountains bellowing.
I heard them I swear
Under a sun yellowing.
I picked a twig of sage two days before
On a mountainside on April four,
Near Fort Collins, Colorado, this same year.
I'd been driven there
In an ancient car
Bya young college pair.
He lean in tight jeans; she pregnant, fair,
\Vhite teeth, red lips, gold hair.
The trees whistled and whispered and
I crushed the brittle grey-green sage.
The pineS were using the wind for a tongue.
I smeIIed the sage on my hands;
Then saw the small-balled dung
Of mule deer. "Look here!"
And before a crow could caII
Ora magpie fall
Into a fir or a ponderosa pine,
The trio of deer walked into the clear
Before the trees on the mothering mountain.
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Sandburg: On the Sixth Day of April This Year
Published by UNM Digital Repository, 1959
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...18
One a young buck with antlers shy,
Two does with great dark eyes.
With watchful step they passed by.
Already the tall young mountain man
Had shot all three
With his camera slung
On his arm. And was creeping like a fourth,
Slowly after them down the north
Slope, as if compelled. The sky yelled
And raced around the snow-stained peaks
And dashed its light in striped streaks
On everything. On the boy who was moving
Like a muscled wild thing, shoving ,.J
The deer before him. You understood
He could stroke their long ears if he would;
They would stand and never move.
I heard the mountains.
I heard the mountains bellow
Under the sky of yellow.
I folded my piece of sage
In a handkerchief, and climbed in a cage,
On a later date,
On April eight
This year,
Of a railway train that rattled and battled
And shuttled and bumped
And swayed across a continent;
Eastward, downward, to Washington.
In a box of bricks·
Under a tree of sticks
Where a lonely starling shrieks,
I opened the cloth.
From the green-grey stuH the scent came up.
Three deer, the buck and both
Dark-eyed does walked through the walls.
I crumpled the sage leaves in the cup
Of my palms and laid them to my face.
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New Mexico Quarterly, Vol. 29 [1959], Iss. 4, Art. 8
https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmq/vol29/iss4/8
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The deer stood
Watchful in a green-glowing aspen wood
In my house in Washington.
Mountams muttered.
Mountains roared.
They bellowed.
1heard them 1swear.
1heard the mountaiils bellow
Under my walls of.ye1}ow.
-HELGA SANDBURG
THE WARNING
The sea shone
and the eart1i trembled
and man arose from the dust
of the street where he had been struck
down and turned ~s eyes
to the sky: at bis side .
stood the children and behind
the women with their apron~
twisted in their hands
and a voice from the mad
sky said "1 am chaos:
I am blood: I am ruin
and devastation," and the trees
bent in the wind and the shIps
at sea sailed into a new darkness:
there was onlya hum
there was only a dull throbbing
there was onlya weird whistle
in the world's brain.
-E. HALE CHATFIELD
J
419
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Sandburg: On the Sixth Day of April This Year
Published by UNM Digital Repository, 1959


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