Dreams

From the Grand Forks Daily Herald, May 17, 1915. By Rosamond L. McNaught.

A humble woman stands at her tubs
    The whole of a summer day;
With splashes and shakes, and wrings and rubs,
    She washes and washes away.
And think you the duty an ugly thing?
    A stupid grind it seems,
And the worker does not smile or sing
    But—over the tubs she dreams her dreams.

Above her sewing a woman bends,
    And cuts and bastes and fits;
And over mistakes that she sometimes mends
    Perplexed brow she knits.
Then at her machine, past the set of sun,
    She stitches the long, long seams;
And though her task is a homely one,
    ’Tis illumed with the flame of a woman’s dreams.

With a “rock-a-by-by” a woman swings
    Her babe in a rocking chair;
And she lays her hand, while she sings
    On the darling’s silken hair.
Both maid and nurse, she is tired to death,
    But her face with glory beams!
For, quickened by balm of the babe’s soft breath,
    She strings in the dusk a chaplet of dreams.