The Swamp

Night settles swiftly with its ghostly tread
Over the tangled swamp where trees lie dead,
Their stumps upright, like lonely shapes of men
Long lost in wet morass and shadowed glen.
A silence broods over the sodden aisles
Of lifelessness that stretch for aching miles
Beyond a moor where clouds hang, gray and cold,
Sinister roofing for a pond grown old.
Night gropes with ease about the stealthy weed
That sucks its life, a tawny, wind-blown reed,
From sodden flooring where mosquitoes hum
Their high soprano to the frogs' shrill drum.