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 tomorrows,

a sky of tomorrows.

I am a brother of the cornhuskers who say

at sundown:

Tomorrow is a day.

Cartoon

I am making a Cartoon of a Woman. She is the People. She is the Great Dirty Mother.

And Many Children hang on her Apron, crawl at her Feet, snuggle at her Breasts.

Smoke and Steel

Smoke of the fields in spring is one,

Smoke of the leaves in autumn another.

Smoke of a steel-mill roof or a battleship funnel,

They all go up in a line with a smokestack,

Or they twist . . . in the slow twist . . . of the wind.

If the north wind comes they run to the south.

If the west wind comes they run to the east.

By this sign

all smokes

know each other.

Smoke of the fields in spring and leaves in autumn,

Smoke of the finished steel, chilled and blue,

By the oath of work they swear: “I know you.”

Hunted and hissed from the center

Deep down long ago when God made us over,

Deep down are the cinders we came from—

You and I and our heads of smoke.

* * *

Some of the smokes God dropped on the job

Cross on the sky and count our years

And sing in the secrets of our numbers;

Sing their dawns and sing their evenings,

Sing an old log-fire song:

You may put the damper up,

You may put the damper down,

The smoke goes up the chimney just the same.