Gateway to the Classics: Display Item
Hilda Conkling

Geography

I can tell balsam trees

By their grayish bluish silverish look of smoke.

Pine trees fringe out.

Hemlocks look like Christmas.

The spruce tree is feathered and rough

Like the legs of the red chickens in our poultry yard.

I can study my geography from chickens

Named for Plymouth Rock and Rhode Island,

And from trees out of Canada.

No; I shall leave the chickens out.

I shall make a new geography of my own.

I shall have a hillside of spruce and hemlock

Like a separate country,

And I shall mark a walk of spires on my map,

A secret road of balsam trees

With blue buds.

Trees Fat smell like a wind out of fairy-land

Where little people live

Who need no geography

But trees.