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 barbwire.

* * *

The cornhuskers wear leather on their hands.

There is no let-up to the wind.

Blue bandanas 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 cornhusks.

The sun, the rain, the wind

loosen cornhusks.

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.