Saga of Leif the Lucky: Part 2 -

Two hundred years —
Upon ten thousand miles of beaches
Never a sail dawned!
Never a glimmer or a shimmer!
The Redmen and the Skraelings
Kept the coasts,
With darkness in their brains,
Stealing up and down a little way
On useless evil errands
Like painted demon-ghosts;
The fire pots in their low canoes
Making a faint red glower in the sky.
So the long night eclipsed the day
While Leif's house mouldered away.
Can you not see the winter closing down
Year after year on Norumbega Town,
And never a ship,
While mothers hid the trembling lip
And told old stories to the dwindling brood
Of fair-hairs round the fires,
Tales of Norwegian fjords, where dwergs
Posturing against the northern lights,
Shouted at little villages
From the high snow-pastured bergs ,
And helgars milked the cows at nights?
Scant grew the food.
They killed their last red cattle,
Whose bellowings no longer frightened
Skraelings now in battle.
In the fields rotted the harrows.
Ever from the forest flitted the stone-tipped arrows,
Till the old men slept in barrows.
And the youths followed old desires
Finding flat-nosed brides beside the Skraeling fires.
Stone axes took the place of steel;
Bears claws the teeth of seal;
Black hair the fair,
Till the last old woman died who used a chair,
Babbling in the lost Nordic tongue
Of Icelandic meadows,
And poppies of the midnight day,
Glorious upon Mount Hekla's slopes
When she was young.

Moss on the thresholds ,
Cold hearthstones,
White bones,
Trees in the houses,
Roots in the stones, —
Vinland the Good,
Oblivion's kiss,
No land has greater mystery than this.