The Trapper's Christmas Eve

It's mighty lonesome-like and drear. Above the wild, the moon rides high and shows up sharp and needle-clear, the emptiness of earth and sky. No happy homes with love for glow, no Santa Claus to make believe, just snow and snow, and then more snow.

It's Christmas Eve. It's Christmas Eve. And here am I, where all things end. And undesirables are hurled. A poor old man, without a friend. Forgot, and dead to all the world. Clean out of sight and out of mind.

Well, maybe it is better so. We all in life are level-find, and mine I guess, is pretty low. Yet as I sit with pipe alight beside the cabin fire, it's queer. This mind of mine must take tonight, the backward trail of fifty-year, the schoolhouse and the Christmas tree, the children with their cheeks

It's a glow, wise that smiling, just half a century ago. Again, it's maybe 40 years, with faith and trust almost divine. These same blue eyes, that brim with tears, through depths of love, look into mine, and lips that cleave, seem so seers ago, and cling and cry.

The truth was the fault for man and woman both deceived and all forgot. Forgivin' too, this Christmas Eve, God pity me is dead. Our children, men and women grow, but they are wed. With little children of their own, that crowd around their Christmas tree.

I would not ever have been grieved, or shed a single tear for me. Tomorrow their joy, this Christmas Eve, stripped to my lost soul, where a wolf-hull cleaves the emptiness. Then Hoshna's death brides haggled, its Christmas morn.