Prairie
5
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?
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- 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.
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- 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.
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