Month: December 2021

The Prospector (Encore)

by Robert W. Service

I strolled up old Bonanza, where I staked in ninety-eight,    A-purpose to revisit the old claim.
I kept thinking mighty sadly of the funny ways of Fate,
And the lads who once were with me in the game.
Poor boys, they’re down-and-outers, and there’s scarcely one to-day
Can show a dozen colors in his poke;
And me, I’m still prospecting, old and battered, gaunt and gray,
And I’m looking for a grub-stake, and I’m broke.

I strolled up old Bonanza. The same old moon looked down;
The same old landmarks seemed to yearn to me;
But the cabins all were silent, and the flat, once like a town,
Was mighty still and lonesome-like to see.
There were piles and piles of tailings where we toiled with pick and pan,
And turning round a bend I heard a roar,
And there a giant gold-ship of the very newest plan
Was tearing chunks of pay-dirt from the shore.

It wallowed in its water-bed; it burrowed, heaved and swung;
It gnawed its way ahead with grunts and sighs;
Its bill of fare was rock and sand; the tailings were its dung;
It glared around with fierce electric eyes.
Full fifty buckets crammed its maw; it bellowed out for more;
It looked like some great monster in the gloom.
With two to feed its sateless greed, it worked for seven score,
And I sighed: “Ah, old-time miner, here’s your doom!”

The idle windlass turns to rust; the sagging sluice-box falls;
The holes you digged are water to the brim;
Your little sod-roofed cabins with the snugly moss-chinked walls
Are deathly now and mouldering and dim.
The battle-field is silent where of old you fought it out;
The claims you fiercely won are lost and sold.
But there’s a little army that they’ll never put to rout —
The men who simply live to seek the gold

The men who can’t remember when they learned to swing a pack,
Or in what lawless land the quest began;
The solitary seeker with his grub-stake on his back,
The restless buccaneer of pick and pan.
On the mesas of the Southland, on the tundras of the North,
You will find us, changed in face but still the same;
And it isn’t need, it isn’t greed that sends us faring forth —
It’s the fever, it’s the glory of the game.

For once you’ve panned the speckled sand and seen the bonny dust,
Its peerless brightness blinds you like a spell;
It’s little else you care about; you go because you must,
And you feel that you could follow it to hell.
You’d follow it in hunger, and you’d follow it in cold;
You’d follow it in solitude and pain;
And when you’re stiff and battened down let someone whisper “Gold,”
You’re lief to rise and follow it again.

Yet look you, if I find the stuff it’s just like so much dirt;
I fling it to the four winds like a child.
It’s wine and painted women and the things that do me hurt,
Till I crawl back, beggared, broken, to the Wild.
Till I crawl back, sapped and sodden, to my grub-stake and my tent —
There’s a city, there’s an army (hear them shout).
There’s the gold in millions, millions, but I haven’t got a cent;
And oh, it’s me, it’s me that found it out.

It was my dream that made it good, my dream that made me go
To lands of dread and death disprized of man;
But oh, I’ve known a glory that their hearts will never know,
When I picked the first big nugget from my pan.
It’s still my dream, my dauntless dream, that drives me forth once more
To seek and starve and suffer in the Vast;
That heaps my heart with eager hope, that glimmers on before —
My dream that will uplift me to the last.

Perhaps I am stark crazy, but there’s none of you too sane;
It’s just a little matter of degree.
My hobby is to hunt out gold; it’s fortressed in my brain;
It’s life and love and wife and home to me.
And I’ll strike it, yes, I’ll strike it; I’ve a hunch I cannot fail;
I’ve a vision, I’ve a prompting, I’ve a call;
I hear the hoarse stampeding of an army on my trail,
To the last, the greatest gold camp of them all.

Beyond the shark-tooth ranges sawing savage at the sky
There’s a lowering land no white man ever struck;
There’s gold, there’s gold in millions, and I’ll find it if I die.
And I’m going there once more to try my luck.
Maybe I’ll fail — what matter? It’s a mandate, it’s a vow;
And when in lands of dreariness and dread
You seek the last lone frontier, far beyond your frontiers now,
You will find the old prospector, silent, dead.

You will find a tattered tent-pole with a ragged robe below it;
    You will find a rusted gold-pan on the sod;
You will find the claim I’m seeking, with my bones as stakes to show it;
    But I’ve sought the last Recorder, and He’s — God.

The Miner’s Dream [Encore]

by Hobo Jim

It was hard and tough but he’d had enough of the ocean and the whale.
So he bid farewell to his shipmates all and he hit the Klondike trail.
Like men of old when he thought of gold, he could see himself a king.
As he took the whip to the huskies’ hitch he could hear the big man sing:

“Ah mush young dogs there’s gold up in the stream,
Shining bright and haunting all my dreams.”

He’d heard stories tell of the arctic hell and the trouble he would see.
But his guide tonight were the northern lights and they lured like covens’ tea
After years on deck of a ship near wreck and the smell of rotting whale
He’d be glad to take any pain or ache he’d be dealt along this trail.“

“Ah mush young dogs there’s gold up in the stream,
Shining bright and haunting all my dreams.”

After years of toil in the arctic soil, the big man found his gold
But it’s sittin’ tight in a hiding site, and never will be sold.
It’s become his friend and likewise the land in a cabin by the stream.
And it’s here he’ll stay ‘til his dying day as he dreams the miners dream.

“Ah mush young dogs there’s gold up in the stream,
Shining bright and haunting all my dreams.” 

 It was hard and tough but he’d had enough of the ocean and the whale.
So he bid farewell to his shipmates all and he hit the Klondike trail.

The Klondike trail…

The Klondike trail…

Copyright© Hobo Jim

[from] the Great Wall of Los Angeles

The Great Wall of Los Angeles (also known as The History of California) is a half-mile long mural painted on the west wall of the Tujunga Flood Control Channel in North Hollywood.  In 1974, the Army Corps of Engineers, which controlled the channel, commissioned Chicana artist Judy Baca to transform the wash with an extended mural that would depict the history of California through images of significant figures, historic events, and the work of immigrant labor in the development of the state’s economy.   Working with the Social and Public Art Resource Center, Baca was primarily responsible for the artistic vision and subject matter in the mural’s segments. It was completed between 1974 and 1984 by teams of young people and artist supervisors.

Here are two of the 86 segments.

For a video of the full mural, go to  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg8ldXwquyc

Journey of the Magi

The Journey Of The Magi

By T.S. Eliot

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
and running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

T.S. Eliot,  1927

[from] Adam Bede

by George Eliot

[With her characteristic fondness for human nature, Eliot describes the haymaking scene in the English countryside of 1799.]

… All hands were to be out in the meadows this morning as soon as the dew had risen; the wives and daughters did double work in every farmhouse, that the maids might give their help in tossing the hay; and when Adam was marching along the lanes, with his basket of tools over his shoulder, he caught the sound of jocose talk and ringing laughter from behind the hedges. The jocose talk of hay-makers is best at a distance; like those clumsy bells round the cows’ necks, it has rather a coarse sound when it comes close, and may even grate on your ears painfully; but heard from far off, it mingles very prettily with the other joyous sounds of nature. Men’s muscles move better when their souls are making merry music, though their merriment is of a poor blundering sort, not at all like the merriment of birds…

Published in 1859, Adam Bede is now in the public domain.

The Night After You Lose Your Job

by Deborah Kuan


You know sleep will dart beyond your grasp. Its edges
crude and merciless. You will clutch at straws,
wandering the cold, peopled rooms of
the Internet, desperate for any fix. A
vapor of faith. An amply paid gig, perhaps,
for simply having an earnest heart or
keeping alive the children you successfully
bore. Where, you’d like to know,
on your résumé do you get to insert
their names, or the diaper rash you lovingly cured
with coconut oil, or the white lies you mustered
about the older man in the cream-colored
truck that glorious spring day, who hung his head
out the window and shouted, “Coronavirus!”
while you were chalking unicorns
and seahorses in the drive? Where
do you get to say you clawed through
their night terrors, held them through their sweaty
grunting and writhing, half-certain a demon
had possessed them, and still appeared
lucid for a 9 a.m. meeting, washed, combed, and collared,
speaking the language of offices?
At last, what catches your eye is posted large-
font and purple: a local mother in search
of baby clothes for another mother
in need. Immediately your body is charged,
athletic with purpose, gathering diapers,
clothes, sleep sacks, packing them tightly in bags.
You tie the bags with a ribbon and set them
on the porch for tomorrow. Then you stand
at the door, chest still thumping wildly, as if
you have just won the lottery—
                           and so you did, didn’t you?
You arrived here, at this night, in one
piece, from a lifetime of luck
and error, with something necessary to give.