Nature poems
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The Reckoning
© Robert William Service
It's fine to have a blow-out in a fancy restaurant,
With terrapin and canvas-back and all the wine you want;
To enjoy the flowers and music, watch the pretty women pass,
Smoke a choice cigar, and sip the wealthy water in your glass.
It's bully in a high-toned joint to eat and drink your fill,
But it's quite another matter when you
A Rolling Stone
© Robert William Service
There's sunshine in the heart of me,
My blood sings in the breeze;
The mountains are a part of me,
I'm fellow to the trees.
The Legless Man
© Robert William Service
My mind goes back to Fumin Wood, and how we stuck it out,
Eight days of hunger, thirst and cold, mowed down by steel and flame;
Waist-deep in mud and mad with woe, with dead men all about,
We fought like fiends and waited for relief that never came.
Eight days and nights they rolled on us in battle-frenzied mass!
"Debout les morts!" We hurled them back. By God! they did not pass.
The Learner
© Robert William Service
I've learned--Of all the friends I've won
Dame Nature is the best,
And to her like a child I run
Craving her mother breast
My Trinity
© Robert William Service
For all good friends who care to read,
here let me lyre my living creed . . .One: you may deem me Pacifist,
For I've no sympathy with strife.
Like hell I hate the iron fist,
The Rhyme Of The Remittance Man
© Robert William Service
There's a four-pronged buck a-swinging in the shadow of my cabin,
And it roamed the velvet valley till to-day;
But I tracked it by the river, and I trailed it in the cover,
And I killed it on the mountain miles away.
The World's All Right
© Robert William Service
Be honest, kindly, simple, true;
Seek good in all, scorn but pretence;
Whatever sorrow come to you,
Believe in Life's Beneficence!
Old Codger
© Robert William Service
Of garden truck he made his fare,
As his bright eyes bore witness;
Health was his habit and his care,
His hobby human fitness.
The Damned
© Robert William Service
Behind blind walls I see them go,
Grim spectres of eternal woe,
Drained grey of hope, dead souls of self-slain,--
And yet I know with pang of pain
It must be so.
Nature's Way
© Robert William Service
To tribulations of mankind
Dame Nature is indifferent;
To human sorrow she is blind,
And deaf to human discontent.
Learn To Like
© Robert William Service
School yourself to savour most
Joys that have but little cost;
Prove the best of life is free,
Sun and stars and sky and sea;
Immortality
© Robert William Service
Full well I trow that when I die
Down drops the curtain;
Another show is all my eye
And Betty Martin.
Dark Truth
© Robert William Service
Birds have no consciousness of doom:
Yon thrush that serenades me daily
From scented snow of hawthorn bloom
Would not trill out his glee so gaily,
Could he foretell his songful breath
Would sadly soon be stilled in death.
The Black Sheep
© Robert William Service
I'm up on the bally wood-pile at the back of the barracks yard;
"A damned disgrace to the force, sir", with a comrade standing guard;
Making the bluff I'm busy, doing my six months hard.
The Dauber
© Robert William Service
In stilly grove beside the sea
He mingles colours, measures space;
A bronze and breezy man is he,
Yet peace is in his face.
I'm Scared Of It All
© Robert William Service
To be forming good habits up there;
To be starving on rabbits up there;
In your hunger and woe,
Though it's sixty below,
Oh, I know that it's safer up there!
The Ape And God
© Robert William Service
Son put a poser up to me
That made me scratch my head:
"God made the whole wide world," quoth he;
"That's right, my boy," I said.
Contentment
© Robert William Service
Bed and bread are all I need
In my happy day;
Love of Nature is my creed,
Unto her I pray;
Sun and sky my spirit feed
On my happy way.
The Three Bares
© Robert William Service
Well, Ma was mighty glad to get that worry off her mind,
And hefting up the bucket so combustibly inclined,
She hurried down the garden to that refuge so discreet,
And dumped the liquid menace safely through the centre seat.
The Three Voices
© Robert William Service
The waves have a story to tell me,
As I lie on the lonely beach;
Chanting aloft in the pine-tops,
The wind has a lesson to teach;
But the stars sing an anthem of glory
I cannot put into speech.
