10 Best Famous Simmons Poems

Here is a collection of the top 10 all-time best famous Simmons poems. This is a select list of the best famous Simmons poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Simmons poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of simmons poems.

• All Famous Simmons Poems

 (or ‘Huddersfield the Second Poetry Capital of England Re-visited’)



What was it Janice Simmons said to me as James lay dying in Ireland?

“Phone Peter Pegnall in Leeds, an ex-pupil of Jimmy’s. He’s organising

A benefit reading, he’d love to hear from you and have your help.”



‘Like hell he would’ I thought but I phoned him all the same

At his converted farmhouse at Barswill, a Lecturer in Creative Writing

At the uni. But what’s he written, I wondered, apart from his CV?



“Well I am organising a reading but only for the big people, you understand,

Hardman, Harrison, Doughty, Duhig, Basher O’Brien, you know the kind,

The ones that count, the ones I owe my job to.”

We nattered on and on until by way of adieu I read the final couplet

Of my Goodbye poem, the lines about ‘One Leeds Jimmy who could fix the world’s.

Duhigs once and for all/Write them into the ground and still have a hundred

Lyrics in his quiver.’



Pete Stifled a cough which dipped into a gurgle and sank into a mire

Of strangulated affect which almost became a convulsion until finally

He shrieked, “I have to go, the cat’s under the Christmas tree, ripping

Open all the presents, the central heating boiler’s on the blink,

The house is on fucking fire!”



So I was left with the offer of being raffle-ticket tout as a special favour,

Some recompense for giving over two entire newsletters to Jimmy’s work:

The words of the letter before his stroke still burned. “I don’t know why

They omitted me, Armitage and Harrison were my best mates once. You and I

Must meet.”



A whole year’s silence until the card with its cryptic message

‘Jimmy’s recovering slowly but better than expected’.



I never heard from Pegnall about the reading, the pamphlets he asked for

Went unacknowledged. Whalebone, the fellow-tutor he commended, also stayed silent.

Had the event been cancelled? Happening to be in Huddersfield on Good Friday

I staggered up three flights of stone steps in the Byram Arcade to the Poetry Business

Where, next to the ‘closed’ sign an out-of-date poster announced the reading in Leeds

At a date long gone.



I peered through the slats at empty desks, at brimming racks of books,

At overflowing bin-bags and the yellowing poster. Desperately I tried to remember

What Janice had said. “We were sat up in bed, planning to take the children

For a walk when Jimmy stopped looking at me, the pupils of his eyes rolled sideways,

His head lolled and he keeled over.”

The title of the reading was from Jimmy’s best collection

‘With Energy To Burn’

with energy to burn.

 Only a Leather Medal, hanging there on the wall,
Dingy and frayed and faded, dusty and worn and old;
Yet of my humble treasures I value it most of all,
And I wouldn't part with that medal if you gave me its weight in gold.

Read the inscription: For Valour - presented to Millie MacGee.
Ah! how in mem'ry it takes me back to the "auld lang syne,"
When Millie and I were sweethearts, and fair as a flower was she -
Yet little I dreamt that her bosom held the heart of heroine.

Listen! I'll tell you about it... An orphan was Millie MacGee,
Living with Billie her brother, under the Yukon sky,
Sam, her pa, was cremated in the winter of nineteen-three,
As duly and truly related by the pen of an author guy.

A cute little kid was Billie, solemn and silken of hair,
The image of Jackie Coogan in the days before movies could speak.
Devoted to him was Millie, with more than a mother's care,
And happy were they together in their cabin on Bunker Creek.

'Twas only a mining village, where hearts are simple and true,
And Millie MacGee was schoolma'am, loved and admired by all;
Yet no one dreamed for a moment she'd do what she dared to do -
But wait and I'll try to tell you, as clear as I can recall...

 . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Christmas Eve in the school-house! A scene of glitter and glee;
The children eager and joyful; parents and neighbours too;
Right in the forefront, Millie, close to the Christmas Tree.
While Billie, her brother, recited "The Shooting of Dan McGrew."

I reckon you've heard the opus, a ballad of guts and gore;
Of a Yukon frail and a frozen trail and a fight in a dringing dive,
It's on a par, I figger, with "The Face on the Bar-Room Floor,"
And the boys who wrote them pieces ought to be skinned alive.

Picture that scene of gladness; the honest faces aglow;
The kiddies gaping and spellbound, as Billie strutted his stuff.
The stage with its starry candles, and there in the foremost row,
Millie, bright as a fairy, in radient flounce and fluff.

More like an angel I thought her; all she needed was wings,
And I sought for a smile seraphic, but her eyes were only for Bill;
So there was I longing and loving, and dreaming the craziest things,
And Billie shouting and spouting, and everyone rapt and still.

Proud as a prince was Billie, bang in the footlights' glare,
And quaking for him was Millie, as she followed every word;
Then just as he reached the climax, ranting and sawing the air -
Ugh! How it makes me shudder! The horrible thing occurred...

'Twas the day when frocks were frilly, and skirts were scraping the ground,
And the snowy flounces of Millie like sea foam round her swept;
Humbly adoring I watched her - when oh, my heart gave a bound!
Hoary and scarred and hideous, out from the tree...it...crept.

A whiskered, beady-eyes monster, grisly and grim of hue;
Savage and slinking and silent, born of the dark and dirt;
Dazed by the glare and the glitter, it wavered a moment or two -
Then like a sinister shadow, it vanished... 'neath Millie's skirt.

I stared. had my eyes deceived me? I shivered. I held my breath.
Surly I must have dreamed it. I quivered. I made to rise...
Then - my God! it was real. Millie grew pale as death;
And oh, such a look of terror woke in her lovely eyes.

Did her scream ring out? Ah no, sir. It froze at her very lips.
Clenching her teeth she checked it, and I saw her slim hands lock,
Grasping and gripping tensely, with desperate finger tips,
Something that writhed and wriggled under her dainty frock.

Quick I'd have dashed to her rescue, but fiercely she signalled: "No!"
Her eyes were dark with anguish, but her lips were set and grim;
Then I knew she was thinking of Billie - the kiddy must have his show,
Reap to the full his glory, nothing mattered but him.

So spiked to my chair with horror, there I shuddered and saw
Her fingrs frenziedly clutching and squeezing with all their might
Something that squirmed and struggled, a deamon of tooth and claw,
Fighting with fear and fury, under her garment white.

Oh could I only aid her! But the wide room lay between,
And again her eyes besought me: "Steady!" they seamed to say.
"Stay where you are, Bob Simmons; don't let us have a scene,
Billie will soon be finished. Only a moment...stay!"

A moment! Ah yes, I got her. I knew how night after night
She'd learned him each line of that ballad with patience and pride and glee;
With gesture and tone dramatic, she'd taught him how to recite...
And now at the last to fail him - no, it must never be.

A moment! It seemed like ages. Why was Billie so slow?
He stammered. Twice he repeated: "The Lady that's known as Lou -"
The kiddy was stuck and she knew it. Her face was frantic with woe.
Could she but come to his rescue? Could she remember the cue?

I saw her whispering wildly as she leaned to the frightened boy;
But Billie stared like a dummy, and I stifled an anxious curse.
Louder, louder she prompted; then his face illumined with joy,
And panting, flushed and exultant, he finished the final verse.

So the youngster would up like a whirlwind, while cheer resounded on cheer;
His piece was the hit of the evening. "Bravo!" I heard them say.
But there in the heart of the racket was one who could not hear -
The loving sister who'd coached him; for Millie had fainted away.

I rushed to her side and grabbed her; then others saw her distress,
And all were eager to aid me, as I pillowed that golden head,
But her arms were tense and rigid, and clutched in the folds of her dress,
Unlocking her hands they found it . . . A RAT . . . and the brute was dead.

In silence she'd crushed its life out, rather than scare the crowd,
And ***** little Billie's triumph . . . Hey! Mother, what about tea?
I've just been telling a story that makes me so mighty proud...
Stranger, let me present you - my wife, that was Millie MacGee.

 Alone in Sutton with Fynbos my orange cat

A long weekend of wind and rain drowning

The tumultuous flurry of mid-February blossom

A surfeit of letters to work through, a mountain

Of files to sort, some irritation at the thought

Of travelling to Kentish Town alone when

My mind was flooded with the mellifluous voice

Of Heath-Stubbs on tape reading ‘The Divided Ways’

In memory of Sidney Keyes.



“He has gone down into the dark cellar

To talk with the bright faced Spirit with silver hair

But I shall never know what word was spoken there.”



The best reader of the century, if not the best poet.

Resonant, mesmeric, his verse the anti-type of mine,

Classical, not personal, Apollonian not Dionysian

And most unconfessional but nonetheless a poet

Deserving honour in his eighty-fifth year.



Thirty people crowded into a room

With stacked chairs like a Sunday School

A table of pamphlets looked over but not bought

A lacquered screen holding court, a century’s junk.

An ivory dial telephone, a bowl of early daffodils

To focus on.



I was the first to read, speaking of James Simmons’ death,

My anguish at the year long silence from his last letter

To the Christmas card in Gaelic Nollaig Shona -

With the message “Jimmy’s doing better than expected.”

The difficulty I had in finding his publisher’s address -

Salmon Press, Cliffs of Moher, County Clare -

Then a soft sad Irish woman’s voice explained

“Jimmy’s had a massive stroke, phone Janice

At The Poet’s House.”





I looked at the letter I would never end or send.

“Your poems have a strength and honesty so rare.

The ability to render character as deftly as a painter.

Your being out-of-fashion shows just how bad things are

Your poetry so easy to enjoy and difficult to forget.

Like Yeats. ‘The Dawning of the Day’ so sad

And eloquent and memorable: I read it aloud

And felt the hairs on the back of my neck prickle

An unflinching bitter rhetoric straight out

Hence the neglect. Your poem about Harrison.



“He has to feel the Odeons sell

Tickets to damned souls, that Dante’s Hell

Is in that red-plush darkness.”



Echoed in Roy Fisher's letter, “Once Harrison and I

Were best mates until fame went to his head.”

James, your ‘Love Leads Me into Danger’

Set off my own despair but restored me

Just as quickly with your sense of beauty’s muted dance.

“passing Dalway’s Bawn

where the chestnuts are, the first trees to go rusty,

old admirals drowned in their own gold braid.”



The scattered alliterations mimic so exquisitely

The random pattern of fallen conkers,

The sense of innocence not wholly clear

The guilt never entirely spent.



‘The Road to Clonbarra’, a poem for the homecoming

After a wedding, the breathlessness of new beginning.

Your own self questioning, “My fourth and last chance marriage,”

Your passionate confessions of failure and plea for absolution

“His thunder storms were in the late night bars.

Home was too hard too dry and far the stars.”



You were so urgent to hear my thoughts on your book

And once too often you were out of luck,

Heath-Stubbs nodded his old sad head.

“Simmons was my friend. I’d no idea he was dead.”

Before I could finish the poem John Rety interrupted

“Can you hurry? There’s others waiting for their turn!”

I muttered to my self, but kept my temper, just...



Eventually Heath-Stubbs began - poet, teacher, wit, raconteur and man

Of letters - littering his poems with references

To three kinds of Arabic genie

The class system of ancient Egypt

The pub architecture of the Edwardian era.

From the back row I strained to see his face.

The craggy jaw, the mane of long white hair.

The bowl of daffodils I’d focused on before.



He spoke but could not read and

Like me had no single poem by heart.

In his stead a man and woman read:

I could forgive the man’s inability to pronounce ‘Dionysian’

But when he read ‘hover’ as ‘haver’

My temper began to frazzle

The woman simpered and ruined every line

As if by design, I took some amitryptilene

And let my mind float free.

‘For Barry, instead of a Christmas card, this elegy

I wrote last week. Fond wishes. Jeremy..’



“So often, David, I still meet

Your benefactor from the time:

her speedwell-blue eyes, blue like yours,





with recollection, while we talk

through leaf-fall, with its mosaic

mottling the toad-spotted wet street.”



I looked at Heath-Stubbs’ face, his sightless eyes,

And in a second understood what Gascoyne meant

“Now the light of a prism has flashed like a bird down the dark-blue,

At the end of which mountains of shadow pile up beyond sight

Oh radiant prism

A wing has been torn and its feathers drift scattered by flight.”

 You were the one I wanted most to know

So like yet unlike, like fire and snow,

The casual voice, the sharp invective,

The barbed wit, the lapsed Irish Protestant

Who never gave a ****, crossed the palms

Of the great and good with coins hot with contempt

For the fakers and the tricksters whose poetry

Deftly bent to fashion’s latest slant.



You wrote from the heart, feelings on your sleeve,

But feelings are all a master poet needs:

You broke all the taboos, whores and fags and booze,

While I sighed over books and began to snooze

Until your voice broke through the haze

Of a quarter century’s sleep. “Wake up you git

And bloody write!” I did and never stopped

And like you told the truth about how bad poetry

Rots the soul and slapped a New Gen face or two

And kicked some arses in painful places,

And so like you, got omitted from the posh anthologies

Where Penguin and Picador fill the pages

With the boring poetasters you went for in your rages,

Ex-friends like Harrison who missed you out.

You never could see the envy in their enmity.

Longley was the worst, a hypocrite to boot,

All you said about him never did come out;

I’ve tried myself to nail others of that ilk

Hither and thither they slide and slither

And crawl out of the muck white as brides’

Fat with OBE’s, sinecures and sighs

And Collected Poems no one buys.



Yet ‘Mainstrem’, your last but one collection,

I had to wait months for, the last borrower

Kept it for two years and likely I’ll do the same

Your poetry’s like no other, no one could tame

Your roaring fury or your searing pain.



You bared your soul in a most unfashionable way

But everything in me says your verse will stay,

Your love for your fourth and final wife,

The last chance marriage that went right

The children you loved so much but knew

You wouldn’t live to see grown up, so caught

Their growing pains and joys with a painter’s eye

And lyric skill as fine as Wordsworth’s best



they drank her welcome to his heritage

of grey, grey-green, wet earth and shapes of stone.

Who weds a landscape will not die alone.



Those you castigated never forgave.

Omitted you as casually as passing an unmarked grave,

Armitage, I name you, a blackguard and a knave,

Who knows no more of poetry than McGonagall the brave,

Yet tops the list of Faber’s ‘Best Poets of Our Age’.



Longley gave you just ten lines in ‘Irish Poets Now’

Most missed you out entirely for the troubles you gave

Accusing like Zola those poetic whores

Who sold themselves to fashion when time after time

Your passions brought you to your knees, lashing

At those poetasters when their puffed-up slime

Won the medals and the prizes time after time

And got them all the limelight while your books

Were quietly ignored, the better you wrote,

The fewer got bought.

Belatedly I found a poem of yours ‘Leeds 2’

In ‘Flashpoint’, a paint-stained worn out

School anthology from 1962. Out of the blue

I wrote to you but the letter came back ‘Gone away

N.F.A.’ then I tried again and had a marvellous letter back

Full of stories of the great and good and all their private sins,

You knew where the bodies were buried.

Who put the knife in, who slept with who

For what reward. They never could shut you up

Or put you in a pen or pay you off and then came

Morley, Hulse and Kennedy’s ‘New Poetry’

Which did more damage to the course of poetry

Than anything I’ve read - poets unembarrassed

By the need to know more than what’s politically

White as snow. Constantine and Jackie Kay

And Hoffman with the right connections.

Sweeney and O’Brien bleeding in all the politically

Sensitive places, Peter Reading lifting

Horror headlines from the Sun to make a splash.

Sansom and Maxwell, Jamie and Greenlaw.

Proving lack of talent is no barrier to fame

If you lick the right arses and say how nice they taste.

Crawling up the ladder, declaring **** is grace.



 A talented drunken public servant

 Has the world’s ear and hates me.

 He ought to be in prison for misuse

 Of public funds and bigotry;

 But there’s some sparkle in his poetry.



You never flinched in the attack

But gave the devils their due:

The ‘Honest Ulsterman’ you founded

Lost its honesty the day you withdrew

But floundered on, publicly sighed and

Ungraciously expired as soon as you died.



You went with fallen women, smoked and sang and boozed,

Loved your many children, wrote poetry

As good as Yeats but the ignominy you had to bear

Bred an immortality impossible to share.

You showed us your own peccadilloes,

Your early lust for fame, but you learned

The cost of suffering, love and talent winning through,

Your best books your last, just two, like the letters

You wrote before your life was through.



The meeting you wanted could never happen:

I didn’t know about the stroke

That stilled your tongue and pen

But if you passed your mantle on to me

I’ll try and take up where you left off,

Give praise where praise is due

And blast the living daylights from those writers who

Betray the sacred art of making poetry true

To suffering and love, to passion and remorse

And try to steer a flimsy world upon a saner course.

 Sitting in outpatients

With my own minor ills

Dawn’s depression lifts

To the lilt of amitryptilene,

A double dose for a day’s journey

To a distant ward.



The word was out that Simmons

Had died eighteen months after

An aneurism at sixty seven.



The meeting he proposed in his second letter

Could never happen: a few days later

A Christmas card in Gaelic - Nollaig Shona -

Then silence, an unbearable chasm

Of wondering if I’d inadvertently offended.



A year later a second card explained the silence:

I joined the queue of mourners:

It was August when I saw the Guardian obituary

Behind glass in the Poetry Library.



How astonishing the colour photo,

The mane of white hair,

The proud mien, the wry smile,

Perfect for a bust by Epstein

Or Gaudier Brjeska a century earlier.



I stood by the shelves

Leafing through your books

With their worn covers,

Remarking the paucity

Of recent borrowings

And the ommisions

From the anthologies.

“I’m a bit out of fashion

But still bringing out books

Armitage didn’t put me in at all

The egregarious Silkin

Tried to get off with my wife -

May he rest in peace.





I can’t remember what angered me

About Geoffrey Hill, quite funny

In a nervous, melancholic way,

A mask you wouldn’t get behind.



Harrison and I were close for years

But it sort of faded when he wrote

He wanted to hear no more

Of my personal life.

I went to his reading in Galway

Where he walked in his cosy regalia

Crossed the length of the bar

To embrace me, manic about the necessity

Of doing big shows in the Balkans.

I taught him all he knows, says aging poet!

And he’s forgotten the best bits,

He knows my work, how quickly

vanity will undo a man.



Tom Blackburn was Gregory Fellow

In my day, a bit mad

But a good and kind poet.”



I read your last book

The Company of Children,

You sent me to review -

Your best by so far

It seemed an angel

Had stolen your pen -

The solitary aging singer

Whispering his last song.

 Arriving for a reading an hour too early:

Ruefully, the general manager stopped putting out the chairs.

“You don’t get any help these days. I have

To sort out everything from furniture to faxes.

Why not wander round the park? There are ducks

And benches where you can sit and watch.”



I realized it was going to be a hungry evening

With not even a packet of crisps in sight.

I parked my friend on a bench and wandered

Down Highgate Hill, realising where I was

From the Waterlow Unit and the Whittington’s A&E.

Some say they know their way by the pubs

But I find psychiatric units more useful.

At a reading like this you never know just who

Might have a do and need some Haldol fast.

(Especially if the poet hovering round sanity’s border

Should chance upon the critic who thinks his Word

Is law and order - the first’s a devotee of a Krishna cult

For rich retirees; the second wrote a good book once

On early Hughes, but goes off if you don’t share his

‘Thought through views’).



In the event the only happening was a turbanned Sikh

Having a go at an Arts Council guru leaning in a stick.

I remembered Martin Bell’s story of how Scannell the boxer

Broke - was it Redgrove’s brolly? - over his head and had

To hide in the Gents till time was called.

James Simmons boasted of how the pint he threw

At Anthony Thwaite hit Geoffrey Hill instead.



O, for the company of the missing and the dead

Martin Bell, Wendy Oliver, Iris and Ted.

 Barbarous insult to Yeats’ memory and Claudel’s

Allen, thank God you are dead, you who breathed the air of Apollinaire,

Ghost of Reverdy bear witness to the mendacity of his clamour,

Hart Crane, rise from the estuary of the great river you drowned in,

John Clare, rise from your country churchyard grave,

Gray, from your carv?d tomb and Wilde, cast off your winged shield

In P?re Lachaise,

Rise poets, rise and drive the barbarous horde without the sacred gates

of Art

Where it has crept and quenched the flame, rendering the Nine silent

And bereft and covered in shame.

Pastmaster of Post Modernist jargon, defiler of the tombs of great poets

Whose souls hover in Elysium or crouch along the banks of black Lethe

Begging a crown to lay on Charon’s palm.

Souls of the great dead rise and deliver us from one who negates

Poetry as the realm of the numinous, toyer with words, vain hack of

Academe,

Spoiler of the silver stream of poetry’s wind-harp voice unseen

Traducer, seducer, traitor, hands red with blood, bearer of the ultimate guilt

Of trahison des clercs, murderer of the subtle spirit of Mallarm?,

Defiler of poetry’s purity as defined by Rilke and Val?ry

Praiser of ultimate poetastry-Duhig’s penny ranting-condemner of Jimmy Simmons-

One Leeds Jimmy who could fix the world’s Duhigs once and for all,

Write them into the ground and still have a hundred lyrics in his quiver.

 My parents thought that I would be
As great as Edison or greater:
For as a boy I made balloons
And wondrous kites and toys with clocks
And little engines with tracks to run on
And telephones of cans and thread.
I played the cornet and painted pictures,
Modeled in clay and took the part
Of the villain in the "Octoroon."
But then at twenty-one I married
And had to live, and so, to live
I learned the trade of making watches
And kept the jewelry store on the square,
Thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, --
Not of business, but of the engine
I studied the calculus to build.
And all Spoon River watched and waited
To see it work, but it never worked.
And a few kind souls believed my genius
Was somehow hampered by the store.
It wasn't true. The truth was this:
I didn't have the brains.

You 'll be wonderin' whut 's de reason
I 's a grinnin' all de time,
An' I guess you t'ink my sperits
[Pg 132]Mus' be feelin' mighty prime.
Well, I 'fess up, I is tickled
As a puppy at his paws.
But you need n't think I's crazy,
I ain' laffin' 'dout a cause.
You's a wonderin' too, I reckon,
Why I does n't seem to eat,
An' I notice you a lookin'
Lak you felt completely beat
When I 'fuse to tek de bacon,
An' don' settle on de ham.
Don' you feel no feah erbout me,
Jes' keep eatin', an' be ca'm.
Fu' I's waitin' an' I's watchin'
'Bout a little t'ing I see—
D' othah night I's out a walkin'
An' I passed a 'simmon tree.
Now I's whettin' up my hongry,
An' I's laffin' fit to kill,
Fu' de fros' done turned de 'simmons,
An' de possum 's eat his fill.
He done go'ged hisse'f owdacious,
An' he stayin' by de tree!
Don' you know, ol' Mistah Possum
Dat you gittin' fat fu' me?
'T ain't no use to try to 'spute it,
'Case I knows you's gittin' sweet
Wif dat 'simmon flavoh thoo you,
So I's waitin' fu' yo' meat.
An' some ebenin' me an Towsah
Gwine to come an' mek a call,
We jes' drap in onexpected
Fu' to shek yo' han', dat's all.
Oh, I knows dat you 'll be tickled,
Seems lak I kin see you smile,
So pu'haps I mought pu'suade you
Fu' to visit us a while.

Tek a cool night, good an' cleah,
Skiff o' snow upon de groun';
Jes' 'bout fall-time o' de yeah
W'en de leaves is dry an brown;
Tek a dog an' tek a axe,
Tek a lantu'n in yo' han',
Step light whah de switches cracks,
Fu' dey 's huntin' in de lan'.
Down thoo de valleys an' ovah de hills,
Into de woods whah de 'simmon-tree grows,
Wakin' an' skeerin' de po' whippo'wills,
Huntin' fu' coon an' fu' 'possum we goes.
Blow dat ho'n dah loud an' strong,
Call de dogs an' da'kies neah;
Mek its music cleah an' long,
[Pg 151]So de folks at home kin hyeah.
Blow it twell de hills an' trees
Sen's de echoes tumblin' back;
Blow it twell de back'ard breeze
Tells de folks we 's on de track.
Coons is a-ramblin' an' 'possums is out;
Look at dat dog; you could set on his tail!
Watch him now—steady,—min'—what you 's about,
Bless me, dat animal's got on de trail!
Listen to him ba'kin now!
Dat means bus'ness, sho 's you bo'n;
Ef he's struck de scent I 'low
Dat ere 'possum's sholy gone.
Knowed dat dog fu' fo'teen yeahs,
An' I nevah seed him fail
Wen he sot dem flappin' eahs
An' went off upon a trail.
Run, Mistah 'Possum, an' run, Mistah Coon,
No place is safe fu' yo' ramblin' to-night;
Mas' gin' de lantu'n an' God gin de moon,
An' a long hunt gins a good appetite.
Look hyeah, folks, you hyeah dat change?
Dat ba'k is sha'per dan de res'.
Dat ere soun' ain't nothin' strange,—
Dat dog's talked his level bes'.
Somep'n' 's treed, I know de soun'.
Dah now,—wha 'd I tell you? see!
Dat ere dog done run him down;
Come hyeah, he'p cut down dis tree.
Ah, Mistah 'Possum, we got you at las'—
Need n't play daid, laying dah on de groun';
Fros' an' de 'simmons has made you grow fas',—
Won't he be fine when he's roasted up brown!