In The Mountains

I.     Land-Marks     The way is rock and rubbish to a road     That leads through woods of stunted oaks and thorns     Into a valley that no flower adorns,     One mass of blackened brier; overflowed     With desolation: whence their mighty load     Of lichened limbs, like two colossal horns,     Two dead trees lift: trees, that the foul earth scorns     To vine with poison, spotted like the toad.     Here, on gaunt boughs, unclean, red-beaked, and bald,     The buzzards settle; roost, since that fierce night     When, torched with pine-knots, grim and shadowy,     Judge Lynch held court here; and the dark, appalled,     Heard words of hollow justice; and the light     Saw, on these trees, dread fruit swing suddenly. II.     The Ox-Team     An ox-team, its lean oxen, slow of tread,     Weighed with an old-time yoke, creaked heavily     Along the mountain road. Beside it, three     Walked with no word: A woman with bowed head,     A young girl, old before her youth had fled,     Hugging a sleeping baby; near her knee     A gaunt hound trotted. Any one could see     The wagon held their all, from box to bed.     Slowly they creaked into the mountain town     And asked their way. Their men had all been killed,     Father and brother, at some mountain ball,     This girl the cause: a man had shot them down,     The father of the infant. As God willed,     They sought another State, and that was all.