On a Discovered Curl of Hair

    When your soft welcomings were said,
    This curl was waving on your head,
    And when we walked where breakers dinned
    It sported in the sun and wind,
    And when I had won your words of grace
    It brushed and clung about my face.
    Then, to abate the misery
    Of absentness, you gave it me.

    Where are its fellows now? Ah, they
    For brightest brown have donned a gray,
    And gone into a caverned ark,
    Ever unopened, always dark!

    Yet this one curl, untouched of time,
    Beams with live brown as in its prime,
    So that it seems I even could now
    Restore it to the living brow
    By bearing down the western road
    Till I had reached your old abode.

    February 1913.