My Sage-Brush Girl
Under a cross in a rainless land my Sage-brush Girl
is sleeping
Her beautiful eyes shine out no more;
her cheeks have shed their bloom
The cactus pierces her dreamless heart and I have
ceased from weeping,
My eyes are dry as the stunted sage that parches
o'er her tomb
The years have withered my flesh like grass, I and
filled my heart with knowing;
I, who was desert born and reared, have I won to
the garden lands.
Where the earth is robed in a rug of green
and the barley blooms are blowing,
And the dewdrops blaze where the stalks of maize
hold up their heavenly hands.
Deep in the dust of a desert waste my Sage-brush
Girl reposes
Her beautiful eyes - shine out no more; her lips have
bloomed and died;
A gypsum bed in the desert dead has won her cheeks'
red roses;
And the day of our dream is a sinking sun dipped
under the Great Divide.
I know who wielded the flaming sword that drove
my tribe before me
Into the dusty desert wide where all the flowers
are dead;
Know why we met in a rainless land when the dream
of dreams came o'er me;
We were the disinherited kin of the lords of meat
and bread.
We were the poor outside the door of the Garden
of Singing Water;
The poor who scurry like hunted things to the arid
wastes to hide.
So I was born to the desert sands and she
deserts daughter--
But I have won to the garden lands, while she in
the desert died.
Those yearning days were a drama dear the the drop
of the curtain closes.
Her beautiful eves shine out no more, her lips have
ceased to glow.
A gypsum bed in the desert dead has won her cheeks'
red roses
But I have seen from a hillside green the black
hawk drifting slow.
___C. L. Edson
| |
Visit the Home Page for Kansas