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A
mother’s prayer, a baby’s cry
tenderest care, a lullaby;
Eating, sleeping night and day,
Brand new tooth and childhood
play.
A new red sled, a bat, a ball;
Boyish laughter down the hall.
First lessons learned of life’s
stern rule,
nine to three in the village
school.
Work and study, work some more,
graduation, high school’s
o’er.
A little girl, a little ring
A wedding march sometime in
spring.
Business built, boys of your
own;
Father and mother, God’s called
home.
Work and worry, going through
Same old paths the old folks
knew.
A book, a chair, a fireplace
wide
A time to dream of friends
who’ve died.
A quiet room, a shaded lamp,
Short gasping breaths, a
forehead damp,
Heart sobs and tears, then
quiet rest,
Thin hands folded ‘gainst the
breast.
The break of dawn, the setting
sun,
The law of life, and life is
done.
O’er every modern
luxury there lies,
The shades of
ancient hardship.
He who flies
across the continent on wings of gauze
Threads a thin
path of meteors because,
his fathers,
wingless, earth bound as they groped,
through marsh and
jungle, upward gazed in hope.
The cars that roll
so ceaselessly today
on velvet wheels
along the concrete way
would find no
highways spanning hill and dale
had not the
drudging ox cart paved the way
Though poverty
awaited where the vast, stark prairie
and horizon met at
last.
Yet was their
goal, how priceless still it seems;
Unhampered
freedom and untrammeled dreams.
Hovels are
mansions, homesteads vast estates
and settlements
are cities now.
The fates caught
up their severed tangled threads and spun,
with magic art,
the pattern they begun.
Caught up
chirmeric hopes, abandoned schemes,
and made a world
more wondrous than their dreams.
The pioneers who
broke this virgin soil
‘ner garnered half
the harvest of their toil
to them the weary
days behind the plow.
To them, the
aching limb, the sweating brow,
To them, the weary
seed time, others reap,
today where once
they sewed, now all is sleep.
Oh, aviator,
conquering realms of blue
a haunting spectra
flies along with you
and vague seen
covered wagons draw strange loads
of ghostly
pilgrims down the long, paved road.
There’s an old home town I long
for
When I’m tired of traveling
round.
Just a quiet country village
Still to me it’s sacred ground.
On the old Chicago turnpike
In the town of Somerset
Stands a village called The
Center
That I never can forget.
You may call me sentimental,
Plain old foggy like, and slow,
But I love that quiet hometown
I was raised in long ago.
Though for years I’ve seen the
cities,
I have never found the joy
That I found there in the
handshakes
Of the home folks when a boy.
Now the old mill wheel is
silent
And the mother’s voice is
still.
I am lonely for the old town,
and the mill pond and the mill.
Selected Poems by
J. Johnson
 
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