After the Winter

After the Winter
Claude McKay

Some day, when trees have shed their leaves

And against the morning’s white
The shivering birds beneath the eaves
Have sheltered for the night,
We’ll turn our faces southward, love,
Toward the summer isle
Where bamboos spire to shafted grove
And wide-mouthed orchids smile.

And we will seek the quiet hill

Where towers the cotton tree,
And leaps the laughing crystal rill,
And works the droning bee.
And we will build a cottage there
Beside an open glade,
With black-ribbed blue-bells blowing near,
And ferns that never fade.

From:  Black Nature:  Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, Edited by Camille T. Dungy, ©2009 by the University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA