Ship me up there, north o' nowhere, where the best is like
the worst;
Where there aren't no p'ints o' compass, and the last one
gets there first.
Take me back to Baffin's Bay,
Where the seal and walrus play;
And the night is long a-comin', when it
Comes, it comes to stay.
[Illustration: TAKA'S TEA HOUSE AT LILY POND]
THE WOMAN WITH THE BROOM
_A Mate for "The Man With The Hoe."_
(Written after seeing a farmer's wife cleaning house.)
Bowed by the cares of cleaning house she leans
Upon her broom and gazes through the dust.
A wilderness of wrinkles on her face,
And on her head a knob of wispy hair.
Who made her slave to sweeping and to soap,
A thing that smiles not and that never rests,
Stanchioned in stall, a sister to the cow?
Who loosened and made shrill this angled jaw?
Who dowered this narrowed chest for blowing up
Of sluggish men-folks and their morning fire?
Is this the thing you made a bride and brought
To have dominion over hearth and home,
To scour the stairs and search the bin for flour,
To bear the burden of maternity?
Is this the wife they wove who framed our law
And pillared a bright land on smiling homes?
Down all the stretch of street to the last house
There is no shape more angular than hers,
More tongued with gabble of her neighbours' deeds,
More filled with nerve-ache and rheumatic twinge,
More fraught with menace of the frying-pan.
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