PIPER TIM

ADESTE FIDELES!

VERMONT

Wide and shallow in the cowslip marshes

Floods the freshet of the April snow.

Late drifts linger in the hemlock gorges,

Through the brakes and mosses trickling slow

Where the Mayflower,

Where the painted trillium, leaf and blow.

Foliaged deep, the cool midsummer maples

Shade the porches of the long white street;

Trailing wide, Olympian elms lean over

Tiny churches where the highroads meet.

Fields of fireflies

Wheel all night like stars among the wheat.

Blaze the mountains in the windless autumn

Frost-clear, blue-nooned, apple-ripening days;

Faintly fragrant in the farther valleys

Smoke of many bonfires swells the haze;

Fair-bound cattle

Plod with lowing up the meadowy ways.

Roaring snows down-sweeping from the uplands

Bury the still valleys, drift them deep.

Low along the mountain, lake-blue shadows,

Sea-blue shadows in the hollows sleep.

High above them

Blinding crystal is the sunlit steep.