The prairie sings to me in the forenoon, and I know in the night I rest easy in the prairie arms, on the prairie heart.

After the sunburn of the day-
handling a pitchfork at a hayrack—
after the eggs and biscuit and coffee,
the pearl-grey haystacks

in the gloaming

are cool prayers

to the harvest hands..

In the city, among the walls, the overland passenger train is choked and the pistons hiss and the wheels curse. On the prairie the overland flits on phantom wheels, and the sky and the soil between them muffle the pistons and cheer the wheels.

I am here when the cities are gone.

I am here before the cities come.

I nourished the lonely men on horses.

I will keep the laughing men who ride iron.

I am dust of the dust of men.

The running water babbled to the deer, the cottontail, the gopher.

You came in wagons, making streets and schools,

Kin of the ax and rifle, kin of the plow and horse,

Singing Yankee Doodle, Old Dan Tucker, Turkey in the

Straw.

You in the coonskin cap at a log-house door hearing a lone wolf howl,

You at a sod-house door reading the blizzards and chinooks let loose from Medicine Hat,

I am dust of your dust, as I am brother and mother

To the copper faces working in flint and clay,

The singing women and their sons of a thousand years ago, Marching single file the timber and the plain.

I hold the dust of these amid changing stars.

I last while old wars are fought, while peace broods motherlike,

While new wars arise and the fresh killings of young men.

I fed the boys who went to France in great dark days. Appomatox is a beautiful word to me, and so is Valley Forge and the Marne and Verdun,

I who have seen the red births and the red deaths

Of sons and daughters, I take peace or war, I say nothing and wait.

cornfields,

Have you seen a red sunset drip over one of my the shore of night stars, the wave lines of dawn up a wheat valley?

Have you heard my threshing crews yelling in the chaff of

a strawpile and the running wheat of the wagonboards, my cornhuskers, my harvest hands hauling crops, singing dreams of women, worlds, horizons?

Rivers cut a path on flat lands.
The mountains stand up.

The salt oceans press in

and push on the coast lines.

The sun, the wind, bring rain,

and I know what the rainbow writes across the

east or west in a half-circle:

A love-letter pledge to come again.

Towns on the Soo Line,

towns on the Big Muddy,

laugh at each other for cubs
and tease as children.

Omaha and Kansas City, Minneapolis and St. Paul-sisters in a house together, throwing slang, growing up. Towns in the Ozarks, Dakota wheat towns, Wichita, Peoria, Buffalo sisters throwing slang, growing up.

Out of prairie-brown grass crossed with a streamer of wigwam smoke, out of a small pillar-a blue promise, out of wild ducks woven in greens and purples,

Here I saw a city rise and say to the peoples round the world: "Listen, I am strong, I know what I want."

Out of log houses and stumps, canoes stripped from tree

sides, flatboats coaxed with an ax from the timberclaims-in the years when the red and the white men met-the houses and streets' rose.

A thousand red men cried and went away to new places for corn and women; a million white men came and put up skyscrapers, threw out rails and wires-feelers to the salt sea: now the smokestacks bite the sky-line with stub teeth.

In an early year the call of a wild duck woven in greens and purples: now the riveter's chatter, the police patrol, the song-whistle of the steam boat.

To a man across a thousand years I offer a handshake. I say to him: "Brother, make the story short, for the stretch of a thousand years is short."

What brothers these in the dark?

What eaves of skyscrapers against a smoke moon,
These chimneys shaking on the lumber shanties
When the coal boats plow by on the river;

The hunched shoulders of the grain elevators;

The flame sprockets of the sheet-steel mills,

And the men in the rolling mills with their shirts off, Playing their flesh arms against the twisting wrists of steel:

What brothers these

in the dark

of a thousand years?

A headlight searches a snowstorm.

A funnel of white light shoots from over the pilot of the Pioneer Limited crossing Wisconsin.

In the morning hours, in the dawn,
The sun puts out the stars of the sky
And the headlight of the limited train.

The fireman waves his hand to a country school-teacher on a bob-sled:

A boy, yellow hair, red scarf and mittens, on the bob-sled; in his lunch-box a pork-chop sandwich and a V of gooseberry pie.

The horses fathom a snow to their knees.
Snow hats are on the rolling prairie hills.
The Mississippi bluffs wear snow hats.

Keep your hogs on changing corn and mashes of grain, O farmerman.

Cram their insides till they waddle on short legs.

Under the drums of bellies, hams of fat,

Kill your hogs with a knife-slit under the ear;

Hack them with cleavers;

Hang them with hooks in the hind legs.

A wagonload of radishes on a summer morning:

Sprinkles of dew on the crimson purple balls.

The farmer on the seat dangles the reins on the rumps of

dapple-gray horses;

The farmer's daughter with a basket of eggs dreams of a new hat to wear to the county fair.