MISCELLANEOUS POEMS

(These miscellaneous poems are all of later date.)

IN GREY DAYS

Measures of oil for others,
  Oil and red wine,
Lips laugh and drink, but never
  Are the lips mine.

Worlds at the feet of others,
  Power gods have known,
Hearts for the favoured round me
  Mine beats, alone.

Fame offering to others
  Chaplets of bays,
I with no crown of laurels,
  Only grey days.

Sweet human love for others,
  Deep as the sea,
God-sent unto my neighbour—­
  But not to me.

Sometime I’ll wrest from others
  More than all this,
I shall demand from Heaven
  Far sweeter bliss.

What profit then to others,
  Laughter and wine? 
I’ll have what most they covet—­
  Death, will be mine.

BRANDON

(ACROSTIC)

Born on the breast of the prairie, she smiles to her sire—­the sun,
Robed in the wealth of her wheat-lands, gift of her mothering soil,
Affluence knocks at her gateways, opulence waits to be won. 
Nuggets of gold are her acres, yielding and yellow with spoil,
Dream of the hungry millions, dawn of the food-filled age,
Over the starving tale of want her fingers have turned the page;
Nations will nurse at her storehouse, and God gives her grain for wage.

THE INDIAN CORN PLANTER

He needs must leave the trapping and the chase,
  For mating game his arrows ne’er despoil,
And from the hunter’s heaven turn his face,
  To wring some promise from the dormant soil.

He needs must leave the lodge that wintered him,
  The enervating fires, the blanket bed—­
The women’s dulcet voices, for the grim
  Realities of labouring for bread.

So goes he forth beneath the planter’s moon
  With sack of seed that pledges large increase,
His simple pagan faith knows night and noon,
  Heat, cold, seedtime and harvest shall not cease.

And yielding to his needs, this honest sod,
  Brown as the hand that tills it, moist with rain,
Teeming with ripe fulfilment, true as God,
  With fostering richness, mothers every grain.

THE CATTLE COUNTRY

Up the dusk-enfolded prairie,
  Foot-falls, soft and sly,
Velvet cushioned, wild and wary,
  Then—­the coyote’s cry.

Rush of hoofs, and roar and rattle,
  Beasts of blood and breed,
Twenty thousand frightened cattle,
  Then—­the wild stampede.

Pliant lasso circling wider
  In the frenzied flight—­
Loping horse and cursing rider,
  Plunging through the night.

Rim of dawn the darkness losing
  Trail of blackened soil;
Perfume of the sage brush oozing
  On the air like oil.