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.