Oh, the land that God forgot
        Where the sand and cactus ruled,
Paradise of rattlesnakes,
        Bald and arid, brackish-pooled;
 
Hither Coronado came
        Lusting after precious stones,
And the fiery desert waste
        Whitened everywhere with bones;
 
Then the Forty-niners passed
        With their oxen gaunt and thin
And they only knew the land
        As a place to perish in;
 
But at last the mind of Man
        With a vision fired and thrilled
Saw how empires lay asleep,
        Dreamed of homes with comfort filled,
 
So the tawny sand was trenched
        With a thousand fluid bars
Which revived the ancient plain
        Like the waterways of Mars:^__
 
Now the tender grass springs up,
        And the sleek kine lay them down,
And the freights toil in and out,
        Fat with wares from many a town;
 
And the wheat rolls, billowy-vast,
        And the ancient ocean bed
Sends up miles of tasseled corn
        Nodding many a silken head;
 
Schools are builded, churches rise,
        Children to the dime are born,
And they learn to love the land
        Once a hissing and a scorn.
 
The land that God forgot,
        Cactus-haunted, desert-wild,
Where the wide, bare bluffs and plains
        Never with a harvest smiled!
 
The land that God forgot,
        Barren with Oblivion's curse!^__
 Nay, it held a wealth, like gold
        In a miser's wretched purse.
 
God forget? Through all the years,
        As a father 'neath a vow,
 He preserved its virgin worth
        For its marriage with the Plow.

^__Harry Kemp.