Poems

Find and share the perfect poems.

A Prodigal

My heart forgot its God for love of you,

And you forgot me, other loves to learn;

Now through a wilderness of thorn and rue

Back to my God I turn.

And just because my God forgets the past,

And in forgetting does not ask to know

Why I once left His arms for yours, at last

Back to my God I go.

From Flint and Feather: The Complete Poems of E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) (The Musson Book Co., Limited, 1917) by Emily Pauline Johnson. This poem is in the public domain.

Emily Pauline Johnson, who also published under her paternal grandfather’s Mohawk name Tekahionwake (“double wampum”), was born on March 10, 1861, on the Six Nations Reserve, Canada West. She was the fourth and youngest child born to George Henry Martin Johnson (Onwanonsyshon), a Mohawk who was both a hereditary and elected chief of the Six Nations. Johnson’s father was fluent in six Indigenous languages, which allowed him to work as a translator. Johnson’s mother, Emily Susanna Howells, was an English-born Canadian from Bristol. Johnson’s father died in 1884.

About Emily Pauline Johnson

Themes

Love

Public Domain

Religion

Sign up for Poem-a-Day

More by this poet

A Cry from an Indian Wife

My Forest Brave, my Red-skin love, farewell;
We may not meet to-morrow; who can tell
What mighty ills befall our little band,
Or what you’ll suffer from the white man’s hand?
Here is your knife! I thought ’twas sheathed for aye.
No roaming bison calls for it to-day;
No hide of prairie cattle will it maim;

Emily Pauline Johnson

1900

At Crow’s Nest Pass

At Crow’s Nest Pass the mountains rend

Themselves apart, the rivers wend

A lawless course about their feet,

And breaking into torrents beat

In useless fury where they blend

At Crow’s Nest Pass.

The nesting eagle, wise, discreet,

Wings up the gorge’s lone retreat

And makes some barren crag her friend

At Crow's Nest Pass.

Uncertain clouds, half-high, suspend

Their shifting vapours, and contend

Emily Pauline Johnson

1917

The City and the Sea

I

To none the city bends a servile knee;
Purse-proud and scornful, on her heights she stands,
And at her feet the great white moaning sea
Shoulders incessantly the grey-gold sands,—
One the Almighty’s a child since time began,
And one the might of Mammon, born of clods;
For all the city is the work of man,
But all the sea is God’s.

Emily Pauline Johnson

1917

Poems

Page submenu block

A Prodigal

More by this poet

A Cry from an Indian Wife

At Crow’s Nest Pass

The City and the Sea

Newsletter Sign Up