Classic Poem

There is one thing you always remember
About a man more than any other.
Sometimes it's a trick of his hand or eyes,
Or an old coat, or a dangling muffler;
And after a while in the neighborhood
A man comes to mean just that one queer thing
That sticks in the memory. I can see
Just one thing when I think of Ezra Brown —
His fingers fumbling at an old wallet
Trying to find a coin that wasn't there
To give to the needy. He spent his time
Trying to find God, and so his wallet
Had the worn lean look of a starved heifer,
And a dumb eloquence that chided him
For his own unworded reproachfulness
Of its shortcomings.

He had a passion
That consumed him like a fire day by day:
It was to walk consciously with his God
As one might with a friend, to feel He entered
Into all the day's concerns large and small,
And was near so you could reach out to His hand
If sorrow or trouble came upon you.
Ezra died on his knees praying; we found him
Kneeling beside his bed one morning
With his head drooped on the patchwork bed-quilt,
Peaceful and quiet as a sleeping child.
He had wanted to be a preacher;
His father and grandfather before him
Thundered the gospel out of the pulpit;
Ezra wanted to follow their footsteps,
But someone had to stay and work the farm,
And so he gave up his hopes of preaching
And settled down to be a plain farmer.
There's his farm up there on the table land;
It looks like a green patch on the mountain.
I've wondered if his praying had to do
With his crops, for the drouth never killed them
And the frosts never troubled his uplands.
He prayed when he was clearing the timber
And kneeled in every freshly-turned furrow,
And beside charred stumps in the new clearings.
He swung the scythe and the buckwheat cradle
To the meter of the Psalms of David,
And set his flail flying at harvest time
To the hymns of Whitefield and Charles Wesley.

He cleared all his land and set out fruit trees,
Worsted nature until she was humble
And he could not feel her strong sullenness
Holding out against his crops and pastures.
The hard work was done; he could take life easy,
For the farm prospered and brought in the money
He enjoyed giving away to tramps that came begging.
But right in the prime of life he lost heart
And his mind clouded. He used to tell us
He had lost God. He had made God his friend
So long that he couldn't live without Him.
He drove out to church regular and went forward
For prayers, but even that didn't help him.
Little by little we saw him going,
Broken, dumb-like, to that far country
That draws us surely when our work is done.

Ezra must have made believe he was God
Or a kind of steward, when he cleared the land
And grubbed stumps and made smooth fields
And planted them to rye and buckwheat and barley.
When he had finished his work polishing
The rough edges of nature the breath of life
Someway went out of him. I think likely
He had stopped creating ; God never stops.
If Ezra had understood and had more strength
He would have pushed out farther into life
And not let God go on ahead of him.