Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, PRAIRIE WOMAN, by SHIRLEY DILLON WAITE


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

PRAIRIE WOMAN, by                    
First Line: This is the dawn! I have awaked too soon
Last Line: And have not these impounded for your need.
Subject(s): Prairies; Women; Plains


This is the dawn! I have awaked too soon.
Cool night possessed me and in dreamful sleep
Gave back my native land. Grant I may keep
This verdured hour against the breathless noon
That stifles prairie women. Give me the croon
Of seabreeze to remember when hot winds leap
Like unleashed hounds across the plains, or creep
At harvest time through quivering wheat fields strewn
With chaff and winnowed grain.
O may I hold
Beneath my consciousness as weft for dreams
The cool and cadenced joy of mountain streams
With gay young April spreading burnished gold
To gladden lean and hungry years. Unfold
Your furrowed sameness, tawny acres; your reams
Of saffron parchment to the sun. Earth teems
With beauty that will never haunt you; age-old
Enchantments prairies cannot know ...
but I
Have heard the sound of lapping water; a boat
Attuned to rhythm of the tides; the cry
Of wheeling gulls as white wings match their speed
With stately ships ... and when my tightening throat
Seems parched beyond all quenching, O I pray
Bring to my memory billows white with spray
Fanned by the ocean's breath; cool draughts from deep
Fern-shaded springs too clear for shadowed gloom.
And you who know high hills, bow down and weep
For women who must share the prairie's doom
And have not these impounded for your need.





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