Joaquin Miller/DGDriscoll*
hat storied land, whereon the light - Of other days gleams faintly still;
- Somelike the halo of a hill
- That lifts above the falling night,
- It once was torn by miners dead;
- Now manzanita, rank and red,
- Drops dusty berries up and down
- Their grass-grown trails. The silent mines
- Are wrapped in chaparral and vines;
- The quail pipes pleasantly. The hare
- Leaps careless o'er the golden oat
- That grows below the water moat;
- The lizard basks in sunlight there.
- The brown hawk swims the perfumed air
- Unfrightened through the livelong day;
- And now and then a curious bear
- Comes shuffling down the ditch by night,
- And leaves some wide, long tracks in clay
- So human-like, so stealthy light.
* Joaquin Miller wrote some good stuff mixed in with lots of not-so-good stuff. The lines above come from his poem: "The Gold That Grew by Shasta Town" which has some great lines and a bunch of mawkish twaddle. I have edited the text above very lightly so most of my contribution is what I threw away, sort of like refining gold from raw ore.