The Call Of Kansas

Surfeited here with beauty, and the sensuous-sweet perfume, Borne in from a thousand gardens and orchards of orange-bloom Awed by the silent mountains; stunned by the breakers roar,^__ The restless ocean pounding and tugging away at the shore,^__ I lie on the warm sand beach and hear, above the crys of the sea, The voice of the prairie calling, Calling me.
Sweeter to me than the salt sea spray, the fragrance of summer: rains;
Nearer my heart than these mighty hills are the windswept: Kansas plains.
Dearer the sight of a shy, wild rose, by the roadside's dusty way, Than all the splendor of poppy-fields, ablaze in the sun of May. Gay as the bold poinsettia is and the wild burden of pepper trees, The sunflower, tawny and gold and brown, is richer to me, than: these.
And rising ever above the song of the hoarse insistent sea, The voice of the prairie calling, Calling me. Kansas, beloved Mother, today in an alien land, Yours is the name I have idly traced with a bit of wood in the: sand,
The name, that, flung from a scornful lip, will make the hot: blood start;
The name that is graven, hard and deep, on the core of my: loyal heart.
O, higher, clearer and stronger yet, than the boom of the savage: sea,
The voice of the prairie calling, Calling me.