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Tom Johnson
Poetry Editor
POETRY BY JAMES MCBRIDE DABBS
Bondage
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She sat across the aisle from me,
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With her black
hat with seven little flowers,
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And her paper
bag,
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And her straw
suitcase
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She was so
palpably going on a vacation.
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But her eyes had stayed at home
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And deep within their shadows
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I saw the bare
farmhouse
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On a
sun-bleached hill,
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And the
kitchen with its milk-pans
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And thumping
churn,
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And flies
droning in the summer heat.
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She was going on a vacation,
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But her eyes
had stayed at home.
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![](../images/dot_clr.gif) Farm Poem
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Steadily the mules
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Moving across
the March fields
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Plow a long poem.
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![](../images/dot_clr.gif) Fisherman
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Now the spangled lure is out,
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Now the dogwoods
gleam,
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Life will play me
for a trout
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Though I know
the stream.
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Life will play me
for a fish
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Again, the reel
will whine.
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Life will always
have its wish;
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I, though briefly,
mine.
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![](../images/dot_clr.gif) Now When Spring's Candles
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Now when spring's candles burn upon the pines
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Above the
dogwood drifted in the green,
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And stars hang
yellow on the jessamine vines
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Against the blue
lake shimmering between;
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Now when the
world needs only to be seen,
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These are the days
when seeing will not do.
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Here is the corner
where the live-oak leans,
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Here is the place
I planned a house with you.
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And here are other
lovers also true
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Within the very
house that we had planned;
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They stand beside
the window looking through,
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Watching the
spring returning, hand in hand.
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While you have
vanished from the blue lake-shore,
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And call no
welcome to me from the door.
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![](../images/dot_clr.gif) Two Loves
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Strange that this afternoon
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Mending the door
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I should see my
lost Love
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Standing as before,
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Smiling there upon
me
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From out the
lessening light,
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Though she will
never seek again
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Shelter from the
night.
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Stranger still that
striving
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For her approving
eyes,
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I should see my
new Love,
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And without
surprise
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Know that I was
mending
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The same door
for her,
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Who'd soon fill
the still house
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With a friendly
stir.
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My early Love,
my new Love,
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Together at the
door;
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One had returned,
the other
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Was never there
before.
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But both of them
were smiling,
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For both
understood
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That love drove
the hammer
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And love shaped
the wood.
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![](../images/dot_clr.gif) To a Lombardy Poplar
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So frail and slim, you, silvered by the moon
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'Tis strange what memory comes stalking back:
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A tortured road in France, tree-bordered, black
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With smoke
that stained the loveliness of June.
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James McBride Dabbs (1896 1970), of Sumter County, is largely remembered as one of the
South's outstanding 20th-century prose stylists (he was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of
Authors in 1990). But for at least 30 years (1913 1943) he was also a published poet. In this season of the
centennial of his birth (May 8), 365 Degrees is pleased to present a sampling of his poetry. "To a Lombardy
Poplar" appeared in The American Poetry Magazine, August 1923; "Bondage" in The
Carolinian, April May 1924; "Two Loves" in Spirit, July 1935; "Now When Spring's
Candles" in Driftwind, March 1937; "Fisherman" in Kaleidograph, February 1938. "Farm
Poem," probably written in 1922, is published here
for the first time.
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