The Prairie Pioneers. He builded a house of sod on the slope of a prairie       knoll; He builded in praise of God, content with the scan-       ty dole. He had builded a nest in the grass, as the ground-       squirrels burrow low; And hither he led a laughing lass in the days of           long ago.       He was a lad and she was a maid;       Their hearts were glad; they were unafraid           Of the world and its waiting woe.   The prairie wind in her face tumbled her tresses       down, The sensitive rose, in its grace, clung to her cotton       gown. The prairie dog beat a retreat and watched them       mournful-eyed, And the buffalo grass beneath her feet said: "Woe           to the prairie bride!"       He was a husband and she was a wife;       A-foot in the daisy fields of life;           They would not be denied.   Who did the law ordain, who wrote the dread       decree That into the desert plain the children of men       should flee? Into a treeless land, the land of little rain, Pressed and driven by penury's hand, shackled           with poverty's chain;       Youth to sicken and love to die, Beauty blasted and hope gone dry,           And grief in a maddened brain.   Ever the hot wind blew, sapping the famished       corn; The night, unblessed by dew, fevered the breath       of morn. A man agape at the skies where no cloud fleeces       go; Weeping, the broken woman lies in the dugout's           furnace glow.       His hope, like the sod corn, curls and wilts;       She writhes on a bed of cotton quilts           In a mother's nameless woe.   O, wind, you are hellish hot; death is the song you       sing; The eggs in the quail's nest rot under her tortured       wing. Dust in a choking cloud wavers and sifts and flies; Dust is the dead babe's pauper shroud; on her sick           breast it lies.       The sod corn crumbles and blows away,       Chaff in the clouds of smoking clay,           Surging against the skies;   He builded a house of sod on the slope of a prairie       knoll; He builded in praise of God, content with the       scanty dole. He had builded a nest in the grass, as the ground-       squirrels burrow low: And hither he led a laughing lass in the days of           long ago.       He was a lad and she was a maid;       Their hearts were glad; they were unfraid           Of the world and its waiting woe. __C. L. Edson.

Sunflowers, A Book of Kansas Poems
Willard Wattles
(Chicago: A. C. McClurg. 1916)
Pages 25-27