• The Joys of the Road

    From the Albuquerque Morning Journal, March 25, 1915. By Bliss Carman.

    Now the joys of the road are chiefly these,
    A crimson touch on the hardwood trees;

    A vagrant morning wide and blue,
    In early fall, when the wind walks, too;

    A shadowy highway cool and brown,
    Alluring up and enticing down;

    From ripply water to dappled swamp,
    From purple glory to scarlet pomp;

    The outward eye, the quiet will,
    And the striding heart from hill to hill.

    An idle moon, a bubbling spring,
    The sea in the pine-tops murmuring;

    A scrap of gossip at the ferry,
    A comrade neither glum nor merry;

    Asking nothing, revealing naught,
    But minting the words from a fund of thought.

    These are the joys of the open road,
    For him who travels without a load.