April 24, 2021: Hiking on Snow

                Hiking on Snow

One thing I’ve learned

Is that hiking on snow;

Especially wet snow,

Isn’t really what I like.

I used to do that

When I was a paper boy,

And I couldn’t ride my bike.

Oh, I remember getting cold,

But one thing I forget

Is how you fall through a drift,

And your shoes and socks get wet

 

How the snow can be hard,

Or fine and flaky,

Or soft and slushy,

And then it can turn very slick,

And staying on your feet

Can sometimes be a trick.

 

Now, there are other substances

That are murder on your feet.

Things can be sharp or crumbly,

Or just hot like a city street.

Sometimes you’ve got to be careful,

Lest something stub your toe.

Some trails are rough,

But I like ’em less

When they’re covered up with snow.

April 24, 2021: Good-bye And Keep Cold in New Enlarged Pocket Book of Robert Frost's Poems, page 258

 Good-bye And Keep Cold

This saying good-bye on the edge of the dark
And the cold to an orchard so young in the bark
Reminds me of all that can happen to harm
An orchard away at the end of the farm
All winter, cut off by a hill from the house.
I don't want it girdled by rabbit and mouse,
I don't want it dreamily nibbled for browse
By deer, and I don't want it budded by grouse.
(If certain it wouldn't be idle to call
I'd summon grouse, rabbit, and deer to the wall
And warn them away with a stick for a gun.)
I don't want it stirred by the heat of the sun.
(We made it secure against being, I hope,
By setting it out on a northerly slope.)
No orchard's the worse for the wintriest storm'
But one thing about it, it mustn't get warm.
"How often already you've had to be told,
Keep cold, young orchard.  Good-bye and keep cold.
Dread fifty above more than fifty below,"
I have to be gone for a season or so.
My business awhile is with different trees,
Less carefully nurtured, less fruitful than these,
And such as is done in their wood with an axe --
Maples and birches and tamaracks.
I wish I could promise to lie in the night
And think of an orchard's arboreal plight
When slowly (and nobody comes with a light)
Its heart sinks lower under the sod.
But something has to be left to God.