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Showing posts with label Will Allen Dromgoole. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Will Allen Dromgoole. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

The Green Trail at Princess Preserve





 The Green Trail has an old wooden bridge crossing the creek flowing to the Matanzas River. There is a small island, a salt marsh, that the bridge connects to the mainland.  Along the trail were rustic benches surrounded by palms and oak trees with limbs hanging heavily with thick Spanish moss.

The Bridge Builder

by Will Allen Dromgoole 1860-1934

An old man going a lone highway,
Came, at the evening cold and gray,
To a chasm vast and deep and wide.
Through which was flowing a sullen tide
The old man crossed in the twilight dim,
The sullen stream had no fear for him;
But he turned when safe on the other side
And built a bridge to span the tide.
 
“Old man,” said a fellow pilgrim near,
“You are wasting your strength with building here;
Your journey will end with the ending day,
You never again will pass this way;
You’ve crossed the chasm, deep and wide,
Why build this bridge at evening tide?”
 
The builder lifted his old gray head;
“Good friend, in the path I have come,” he said,
“There followed after me to-day
A youth whose feet must pass this way.
This chasm that has been as naught to me
To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be;
He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;
Good friend, I am building this bridge for him!”

Source: Father: An Anthology of Verse (EP Dutton & Company, 1931)
Will Allen Dromgoole was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. A prolific author who wrote novels, plays, and more than 8,000 poems, she was the author of the best-selling novel The Island of the Beautiful (1911).