Hazel Rawson Cades: Feel of Brambles

“She will bear him children with straight backs and sturdy limbs,
Clear-eyed children with untroubled minds.
Mine would have been brown things, questioners—
With little hoofs, I think;
Lovers of wind and rain
And twisted brambly paths over the hills.
But he was afraid—afraid of the brown-hoofed ones;
And more afraid that sometimes,
As we grew old together,
I would slip away from him to the hills;
Where he—because of gout, or girth, or civic dignity—
Could not come after.

He need not have been troubled:
Long before that I should have lost the feel of brambles.”