The Home of my Childhood

How dear to my thought is the place of my childhood,

It once was my fathers, but now it is mine;

Just under the lee of the Northwestern wildwood,    

Where mother milked cows and father fed swine.

No fashion or style e'er the building attended,

But sheltered with strong oak of the best,

The short winding staircase so easy ascended,

The sliding plank window that looked to the West.

Here I when a child was protected from danger,

Here I in my youth was accustomed to roam;

Here often my parents have sheltered the stranger,

And treated the traveler far from his home.

There stands in the yard the patriarch cherry,

Where oft I have sat in the shade of the tree,

Where mother with butter and milk from the dairy,

Has feasted my sisters, my brothers and me.

The trees of red pears in the garden still standing,       

Spread over the lilac and cover the rose,

Still bearing their fruit and their branches expanding,

Shade o'er the green turf for a place of repose.

The trees of the orchard by storms have been broken,

And many have mouldered and gone to decay,

Yet, some of the strongest remain as a token,

The marks of antiquity still to display.

The mossy old spring where I often have rested,

When father and I had wrought at the plough;

The bunch of green brambles where chickens have nested,

 Were there in past ages and still are there now.

 My sister came there and I then did respect her,

 Her flowing locks waving as she tript in the gale,

 A sip from her gourd tasted sweeter than nectar,

 Before she took up and went home with the pail.

 The oak at the spring whose shade has grown wider,

 Whose limbs are extended, whose tops have grown tall,

 The hickory tree where my father pressed cider,

 Still bearing and dropping its nuts in the fall.

 The pine through whose branches cool breezes now fan us,

 In Winter a covert, in Summer a shade,

 Have grown like the cedars of Lebanon,         

 And cover the fields which our fathers have made.   

 The graves of the dead who rest from their labors,

 I visit alone in the cool of the day.

 For there lie my parents, relations and neighbors,

 And some of my ancestors older than they.

 For what the Lord gave He again hath exacted,

 The souls that He gave He had taken away;

 The hulls are laid here, but the kernels extracted,

 Like the fruit that has fallen and gone to decay.

 Tis here I converse with my Lord and Creator,

 Tis here I remember I shortly must die.

 Recounting my deeds with prayer to my maker,  

 While viewing the ground where I shortly must lie.
       

                                           Stephen Howison III