Trailing Arbutus

From fruitful hills, a timid girl she came
To prairie lands that never knew a tree;
Exchanged her colored woods, her happy friends
For long, gray miles, and grim monotony;
For dim-eyed settlers always talking rain;
So hungry for her beauty-dripping land,
A hatred for the prairie filled her heart,
It spoke no language she could understand.

Year followed year; the prairie land is home,
A woman now, the lonely little lass!
Who loves the special secrets of the plains^___
The brushes in the kinky buff'lo grass,
The clownish tumbleweed, the pink wild rose
(More lovely for its saucy little sharps!)
The far mirage, the strange black art it knows^___
The wind-song in the cottonwood's high harps!
And yet, there comes a moment every spring^___
A homesick urging all her being fills:
While here, March winds shout by with slap and sting,
Arbutus peeps in Pennsylvania hills.

^__Nell Lewis Woods.

Contemporary Kansas Poetry
Helen Rhoda Hoopes
Page 136
(Kansas City: Joseph D. Havens Company. 1927)