I WAS born on the prairie and the milk of its wheat, the red
of its clover, the eyes of its women, gave me a song and a
slogan.
Here the water went down, the icebergs slid with gravel,
the gaps and the valleys hissed, and the black loam came,
and the yellow sandy loam.
Here between the sheds of the Rocky Mountains and the
Appalachians,
here now a morning star fixes a fire sign over the timber
claims and cow pastures,
the corn belt, the cotton belt, the cattle ranches.
Here the gray geese go five hundred miles and back with a
wind under their wings
honking the cry for a new home.
Here I know I will hanker after nothing so much as one
more sunrise or a sky moon
of fire doubled to a river moon of water.
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-gray 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 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, the worker in flint and clay,
The singing women and their sons 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 mother-like,
While new wars arise and the fresh killings of young men.
I fed the boys who went to France in great dark days. Appomattox
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.
Have you seen a red sunset drip over one of my cornfields, 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 straw pile
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 smoke 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 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 timber claims—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 skyline 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 steamboat.
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 bobsled.
A boy, yellow hair, red scarf
and mittens, on the bobsled, 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.
. . .
On the left-and right-hand side of the road, Marching corn— I saw it
knee high weeks ago—now it is head high—tassels of red silk creep at
the ends of the ears.
. . .
I am the prairie, mother of men, waiting.
They are mine, the threshing crews eating beefsteak, the farmboys
driving steers to the railroad cattle pens. They are mine, the crowds
of people at a Fourth of July basket picnic, listening to a lawyer read
the Declaration of Independence, watching the pinwheels and
Roman candles at night, the young men and women two by two hunting
the bypaths and kissing bridges.
They are mine, the horses looking over a fence in the frost of late
October saying good-morning to the horses hauling wagons of rutabaga
to market.
They are mine, the old zigzag rail fences, the new barb wire.
. . .
The cornhuskers wear leather on their hands. There is no let-up to the wind.
Blue bandannas are knotted at the ruddy chins.
Falltime and winter apples take on the smolder of the five-o'clock
November sunset: falltime, leaves, bonfires, stubble, the old things go,
and the earth is grizzled.
The land and the people hold memories, even among the anthills and the
angleworms, among the toads and woodroaches—among gravestone writings
rubbed out by the rain—they keep old things that never grow old.
The frost loosens corn husks.
The Sun, the rain, the wind loosen corn husks.
The men and women are helpers. They are all cornhuskers together.
I see them late in the western evening in a smoke-red dust.
. . .
The phantom of a yellow rooster flaunting a scarlet comb, on top of a
dung pile crying hallelujah to the streaks of daylight,
The phantom of an old hunting dog nosing in the underbrush for muskrats,
barking at a coon in a treetop at midnight, chewing a bone, chasing his
tail round a corncrib,
The phantom of an old workhorse taking the steel point of a plow across
a forty-acre field in spring, hitched to a harrow in summer, hitched to
a wagon among cornshocks in fall,
These phantoms come into the talk and wonder of people on the front porch
of a farmhouse late summer nights.
"The shapes that are gone are here," said an old man with a cob pipe in
his teeth one night in Kansas with a hot wind on the alfalfa.
. . .
Look at six eggs In a mockingbird's nest.
Listen to six mockingbirds Flinging follies of O-be-joyful
Over the marshes and uplands. Look at songs Hidden in eggs.
. . .
When the morning sun is on the trumpet-vine blossoms, sing at the kitchen
pans:
Shout All Over God's Heaven. When the rain slants on the potato hills
and the sun plays a silver shaft on the last shower, sing to the bush
at the backyard fence: Mighty Lak a Rose.
When the icy sleet pounds on the storm windows and the house lifts to a
great breath, sing for the outside hills: The Ole Sheep Done Know the
Road, the Young Lambs Must Find the Way.
. . .
Spring slips back with a girl face calling always: "Any new songs for me?
Any new songs?"
O prairie girl, be lonely, singing, dreaming, waiting—your lover comes—your
child comes—the years creep with toes of April rain on new-turned sod.
O prairie girl, whoever leaves you only crimson poppies to talk with,
whoever puts a good-by kiss on your lips and never comes back— There
is a song deep as the falltime redhaws, long as the layer of black loam
we go to, the shine of the morning star over the corn belt, the wave
line of dawn up a wheat valley.
. . .
O prairie mother, I am one of your boys. I have loved the prairie as
a man with a heart shot full of pain over love.
Here I know I will hanker after nothing so much as one more sunrise or a
sky moon of fire doubled to a river moon of water.
. . .
I speak of new cities and new people. I tell you the past is a bucket
of ashes.
I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down, a sun dropped in the west.
I tell you there is nothing in the world only an ocean of to-morrows,
a sky of to-morrows.
I am a brother of the cornhuskers who say at sundown: To-morrow is a day.
I WAS born on the prairie and the milk of its wheat, the red of its clover,
the eyes of its women, gave me a song and a slogan.
Here the water went down, the icebergs slid with gravel, the gaps and the
valleys hissed, and the black loam came, and the yellow sandy loam.
Here between the sheds of the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians,
here now a morning star fixes a fire sign over the timber claims and cow pastures,
the corn belt, the cotton belt, the cattle ranches.
Here the gray geese go five hundred miles and back with a wind under their wings
honking the cry for a new home.
Here I know I will hanker after nothing so much as one more sunrise or a sky moon
of fire doubled to a river moon of water.
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-gray 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 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, the worker in flint and clay, The singing women and their
sons 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 mother-like, While new wars
arise and the fresh killings of young men.
I fed the boys who went to France in great dark days.
Appomattox 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.
Have you seen a red sunset drip over one of my cornfields, 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 smoke
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 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 timber claims—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 skyline 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 steamboat.
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 bobsled.
A boy, yellow hair, red scarf and mittens, on the bobsled, 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.
.
.
.
On the left-and right-hand side of the road, Marching corn— I saw it knee high
weeks ago—now it is head high—tassels of red silk creep at the ends of the ears.
.
.
.
I am the prairie, mother of men, waiting.
They are mine, the threshing crews eating beefsteak, the farmboys driving steers
to the railroad cattle pens.
They are mine, the crowds of people at a Fourth of July basket picnic, listening
to a lawyer read the Declaration of Independence, watching the pinwheels and
Roman candles at night, the young men and women two by two hunting the bypaths
and kissing bridges.
They are mine, the horses looking over a fence in the frost of late October
saying good-morning to the horses hauling wagons of rutabaga to market.
They are mine, the old zigzag rail fences, the new barb wire.
.
.
.
The cornhuskers wear leather on their hands.
There is no let-up to the wind.
Blue bandannas are knotted at the ruddy chins.
Falltime and winter apples take on the smolder of the five-o'clock November
sunset: falltime, leaves, bonfires, stubble, the old things go, and the earth
is grizzled.
The land and the people hold memories, even among the anthills and the angleworms,
among the toads and woodroaches—among gravestone writings rubbed out by the
rain—they keep old things that never grow old.
The frost loosens corn husks.
The Sun, the rain, the wind loosen corn husks.
The men and women are helpers.
They are all cornhuskers together.
I see them late in the western evening in a smoke-red dust.
.
.
.
The phantom of a yellow rooster flaunting a scarlet comb, on top of a dung pile
crying hallelujah to the streaks of daylight, The phantom of an old hunting dog
nosing in the underbrush for muskrats, barking at a coon in a treetop at midnight,
chewing a bone, chasing his tail round a corncrib, The phantom of an old workhorse
taking the steel point of a plow across a forty-acre field in spring, hitched to
a harrow in summer, hitched to a wagon among cornshocks in fall, These phantoms
come into the talk and wonder of people on the front porch of a farmhouse late
summer nights.
"The shapes that are gone are here," said an old man with a cob pipe in his teeth
one night in Kansas with a hot wind on the alfalfa.
.
.
.
Look at six eggs In a mockingbird's nest.
Listen to six mockingbirds Flinging follies of O-be-joyful Over the marshes
and uplands.
Look at songs Hidden in eggs.
.
.
.
When the morning sun is on the trumpet-vine blossoms, sing at the kitchen pans:
Shout All Over God's Heaven.
When the rain slants on the potato hills and the sun plays a silver shaft on the
last shower, sing to the bush at the backyard fence: Mighty Lak a Rose.
When the icy sleet pounds on the storm windows and the house lifts to a great
breath, sing for the outside hills: The Ole Sheep Done Know the Road, the Young
Lambs Must Find the Way.
.
.
.
Spring slips back with a girl face calling always: "Any new songs for me? Any new
songs?" O prairie girl, be lonely, singing, dreaming, waiting—your lover
comes—your child comes—the years creep with toes of April rain on new-turned sod.
O prairie girl, whoever leaves you only crimson poppies to talk with, whoever
puts a good-by kiss on your lips and never comes back— There is a song deep as
the falltime redhaws, long as the layer of black loam we go to, the shine of the
morning star over the corn belt, the wave line of dawn up a wheat valley.
.
.
.
O prairie mother, I am one of your boys.
I have loved the prairie as a man with a heart shot full of pain over love.
Here I know I will hanker after nothing so much as one more sunrise or a sky
moon of fire doubled to a river moon of water.
.
.
.
I speak of new cities and new people.
I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.
I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down, a sun dropped in the west.
I tell you there is nothing in the world only an ocean of to-morrows,
a sky of to-morrows.
I am a brother of the cornhuskers who say at sundown: To-morrow is a day.
dining in the coneflowers
small bird on its own
©️2018 Ontheland
expanding from a speck
to untold realms.
at early dawn
the fragrance of summer
sweet lavenderLucy King -2018
Blaue Hortensie
Rainer Maria Rilke, July 1906, Paris
Blaue Hortensie
So wie das letzte Grün in Farbentiegeln
sind diese Blätter, trocken, stumpf und rau,
hinter den Blütendolden, die ein Blau
nicht auf sich tragen, nur von ferne spiegeln.
Sie spiegeln es verweint und ungenau,
als wollten sie es wiederum verlieren,
und wie in alten blauen Briefpapieren
ist Gelb in ihnen, Violett und Grau;
Verwaschenes wie an einer Kinderschürze,
Nichtmehrgetragenes, dem nichts mehr geschieht:
wie fühlt man eines kleinen Lebens Kürze.
Doch plötzlich scheint das Blau sich zu verneuen
in einer von den Dolden, und man sieht
ein rührend Blaues sich vor Grünem freuen.
This translation is by Guntram Deichsel
Blue Hydrangea
Just like the last green in a colour pot
So are these leaves, withered and wrecked
Behind the flower umbels, which reflect
A hue of blue only, more they do not.
Reflections are tear-stained, inaccurate,
As if they were about to cease,
And like old blue notepaper sheets
They wear some yellow, grey and violet,
Washed-out like on a children's apron,
Outworn and now no more in use:
We contemplate a small life's short duration.
But suddenly some new blue seemingly is seen
In just one umbel, and we muse
Over a moving blue delighting in the green.
Translation © by Guntram Deichsel, 2003-12-03
