Macon Prairie by Willa Cather

(NEBRASKA)

She held me for a night against her bosom, / The aunt who died when I was yet a baby, / The girl who scarcely lived to be a woman. / Stricken, she left familiar earth behind her, / Mortally ill, she braved the boisterous ocean, / Dying, she crossed irrevocable rivers, / Hailed the blue Lakes, and saw them fade forever, / Hungry for distances; -- her heart exulting / That God had made so many seas and countries / To break upon the eye and sweep behind her. / From one whose love was tempered by discretion, / From all the net of caution and convenience / She snatched her high heart for the great adventure, / Broke her bright bubble under far horizons, -- / Among the skirmishers that teased the future, / Precursors of the grave slow-moving millions / Already destined to the Westward-faring.

They came, at last, to where the railway ended, / The strange troop captained by a dying woman; / The father, the old man of perfect silence, / The mother, unresisting, broken-hearted, / The gentle brother and his wife, both timid, / Not knowing why they left their native hamlet; / Going as in a dream, but ever going.

In all the glory of an Indian summer, / The lambent transmutations of October, / They started with the great ox-teams from Hastings / And trekked in a southwesterly direction, / Boring directly toward the fiery sunset. / Over the red grass prairies, shaggy-coated, / Without a goal the caravan proceeded; / Across the tablelands and rugged ridges, / Through the coarse grasses which the oxen breasted, / Blue-stem and bunch-grass, red as sea-marsh samphire. / Always the similar, soft undulations / Of the free-breathing earth in golden sunshine, / The hardy wind, and dun hawks flying over / Against the unstained firmament of heaven.

In the front wagon, under the white cover, / Stretched on her feather-bed and propped with pillows, / Never dismayed by the rude oxen's scrambling, / The jolt of the tied wheel or brake or hold-back, / She lay, the leader of the expedition; / And with her burning eyes she took possession / Of the red waste, -- for hers, and theirs, forever.

A wagon-top, rocking in seas of grasses, / A camp-fire on a prairie chartless, trackless, / A red spark under the dark tent of heaven. / Surely, they said, by day she saw a vision, / Though her exhausted strength could not impart it, -- / Her breathing hoarser than the tired cattle.

When cold, bright stars the sunburnt days succeeded, / She took me in her bed to sleep beside her, -- / A sturdy bunch of life, born on the ocean. / Always she had the wagon cover lifted / Before her face. The sleepless hours till daybreak / She read the stars.

"Plenty of time for sleep," she said, "hereafter."

She pointed out the spot on Macon prairie, / Telling my father that she wished to lie there. / "And plant, one day, an apple orchard round me, / In memory of woman's first temptation, / And man's first cowardice. " / That night, within her bosom, / I slept. / Before the morning / I cried because the breast was cold behind me.

Now, when the sky blazes like blue enamel, / Brilliant and hard over the blond cornfields, / And through the autumn days our wind is blowing / Like the creative breath of God Almighty -- / Then I rejoice that offended love demanded / Such wide retreat, and such self-restitution; / Forged an explorer's will in a frail woman, / Asked of her perfect faith and renunciation, / Hardships and perils, prophecy and vision, / The leadership of kin, and happy ending / On the red rolling land of Macon prairie.