Poem of the Week for New Year 2004
December 29, 2003
Remembered for her condemnation of US Indian policy, A Century of Dishonor (1881), and a much-read novel of California Indian life, Ramona (1884), Helen Hunt Jackson was also a poet of considerable reputation. Various poems, signed "H. H.", appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Scribner's Monthly Magazine, St. Nicholas, and other magazines and many newspapers.
H. H.'s "Colorado Snow-birds" are juncos, most likely. It is a poem for children and first appeared in St. Nicholas.
I'll tell you how the snow-birds come,
Here in our Winter days ;
They make me think of chickens,
With their cunning little ways.
We go to bed at night, and leave
The ground all bare and brown,
And not a single snow-bird
To be seen in all the town.
But when we wake at morning
The ground with snow is white,
And with the snow, the snow-birds
Must have travelled all the night ;
For the streets and yards are full of them,
The dainty little things,
With snow-white breasts, and soft brown heads,
And speckled russet wings.
Not here and there a snow-bird,
As we see them at the East,
But in great flocks, like grasshoppers,
By hundreds, at the least,
They push and crowd and jostle,
And twitter as they feed,
And hardly lift their heads up,
For fear to miss a seed.
What 'tis they eat, nobody seems
To know or understand ;
The seeds are much too fine to see,
All sifted in the sand.
But winds last Summer scattered them,
All thickly on these plains ;
The little snow-birds have no barns,
But God protects their grains.
They let us come quite near them,
And show no sign of dread ;
Then, in a twinkling, the whole flock
Will flutter on ahead
A step or two, and light, and feed,
And look demure and tame,
And then fly on again, and stop,
As if it were a game.