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Autumn Leaves

Chapter 87: TO MOUNT SIERRA.
By Ardelia Maria Cotton Barton
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Poetry

About This Book

A compact poetry collection gathers short lyrical and didactic pieces that reflect on mortality, memory, love, duty, and spiritual consolation, often using nature and seasonal imagery to frame moral and emotional insights. Many poems shift between wistful reverie and exhortation, imagining dreamlike flights, harvest metaphors about deeds and consequences, prayers, meditations on motherhood and friendship, and speculative lines about reincarnation and the afterlife. The work mixes tender sentiment, moral counsel, and pastoral description across brief, accessible poems that alternate consolation with sober reminders of life's hardships.

TO MOUNT SIERRA.

Thou grand old granite mountain
Canst tell me what thy age?
What secrets art thou holding
Within thy heart O sage.

Couldst man find out by delving
Deep in thy stony breast,
How long thou hast been rearing
On high, thy hoary crest.

Hadst thou e’er a beginning?
Wilt thou in death e’er fall?
Canst thou these questions answer?
On thee I humbly call.

Is life, within thy bosom?
Or art thou cold and dead?
Thou standest in thy myst’ry
No tears of misery shed.

Thy heart, thy life is granite,
Thou carest not for woe.
If tear thou ever sheddest
It turns to ice and snow.

But why seek I thy secrets,
Thou haughty mountain king?
Thou wilt not give me answer,
No knowledge to me bring.—

The wind doth give me answer
That thou wast born of fire.
Thou claimest Earth as mother,
Jehovah is thy sire.

Farewell O Mount Sierra!
I leave thee to thy rest.
But, man will wrench thy secrets
In future from thy breast.