a found poem: The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery
Our crisp sere old love
was no
glorious glad home
of scarlet and gold virtue.
It was a nondescript
blue sky
with trudged trails
of funny yellow cloud
straying over
stubble-lands and pastures
plastered
with dirt and mud.
It was something
like a lacy bright white
birch—just perfectly
and brilliantly
tattered from a deep
exhilarating hate.
This has been such a perfectly exquisite day that I’ve just got to say something about it. It was so bright and crisp, with an exhilarating air and such a lovely sky—brilliantly blue, with lacy trails of misty white cloud straying over it. But I hadn’t much time to enjoy it. We were picking potatoes all day up in our hill field. I don’t think anybody ever got to such a pitch of virtue as to like potato-picking. I hate it! But since pick I had to I was glad it was up in the hill field because I love that field. There is such a glorious view from it—the deep blue sea, the pond as blue as a sapphire, the groves of maple and birch just turning to scarlet and gold, the yellow stubble-lands and the sere pastures. I just love to look at such things. But glory be that we are done with the potatoes! To be sure, potato-picking has its funny side. It would have made a hermit laugh to have seen Lu and me as we trudged home tonight, in tattered, beclayed old dresses, nondescript hats and faces plastered with dirt and mud. But we didn’t feel funny—no, indeed!
