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.