Page:Anthology of Magazine Verse (1921).djvu/123

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Fields of cotton, and fields of wheat,Thunder-blue gentians by a wire fence,Standing cypress, red and tense,Holding its flower rigid like a gun,Dressed for parade by the running wheat,By the little bouncing cotton. Terribly sweetThe cardinals sing in the live-oak trees,And the long plain breeze,The prairie breeze,Blows across from swell to swellWith a ginger smell.Just ahead where the road curves round,A long-eared rabbit makes a boundInto a wheat-field, into a cotton-field,His track glitters after him and goes still againOver to the left of my bridle-rein.
But over to the right is a glare—glare—glare—Of sharp glass windows,A narrow square of brick jerks thickly up above the cotton plants,A raucous mercantile thing flaring the sun from thirty-six windows,Brazenly declaring itself to the lovely fields.Tram-cars run like worms about the feet of this thing,The coffins of cotton-bales feed it,The threshed wheat is its golden blood.But here it has no feet,It has only the steep ironic grin of its thirty-six windows,Only its basilisk eyes counting the fields,Doing sums or how many buildings to a city, all day and all night.
Once they went a-riding, a-riding,Over the great long plain,Cowboys singing to their dogey steers,Cowboys perched on forty-dollar saddles,Riding to the North, six months to get there,

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