for homesteaders Linnie, Allie & Minyard Cornell
Who now can read the writing
of the plow upon that distant hill?
I have seen winter work its will
upon that page, and works it still.
This is the prairie of the lie,
Jim Hill’s ‘Rain every spring,
grain where it falls, grass knee-high.’
Truth, solemn as the drought,
drove the luckless homesteader out.
Their lives in ruins where winter squats,
the last harvest remembered squalor,
a latch turned down on a loose screen door,
the wind sweeping the linoleum floor.
Left behind, desolation dry
as my father’s humor,
hail bright as alkali,
mother mad with wind,
and failed barbed wire.
At the dry fork of Beauchamp,
the blue-eyed Indian
lodges at the stony end,
his neat loop melted
down in buffalo grass,
his dally blowing dust.
This white life his last lie.
It’s my life now,
watching the moon rise,
seeing the undulant prairie shine –
a clean page
awaiting one true word.
–Glen Larum