February the First on the Prairies / Wilson MacDonald

February the First on the Prairies

The page is snowy white, the pen is dipped,
And yet unwritten is this manuscript —
Save for a scattered letter leagues apart.

But through this frail beginning I can peer
On days when all this wilderness shall hear
The rhythmic throbbings of the human heart.

The heavens are bare; no clouds are on her face
To make the laggard sun increase his pace
Above the rusted hillocks bare and red.

The yellow straw-pipes, spearing through the ice,
Are lovely from an ancient sacrifice;
They gave and hear the nations breaking bread.

The prairie lands are spread to-day for me
Like frozen billows on a pulseless sea
That waits the golden wheat’s releasing tide.

Here, in his largest mood, the artist tries
To catch the amber glory with his dyes,
And sees, with aching soul, his task defied.

Bolder, the poet, with a stronger hand
Anoints with song this little-laurelled land,
Weaving the west winds wildly in his rune.

He sees the cattle stand with moveless tails,
And heads together, to outwit the gales
That blow the bronze of summer from the moon.

He sees, beside a ridge where poplars grow,
A bronco coldly nosing in the snow,
And gains the prairie vastness from his form.

He sees the patient straw-stack, brown with rain,
A giant, ripened mushroom of the plain
Whose stem is worn by rubbing flank and storm.

Here, while the blizzard aches its heart in sound,
The cattle move like driftwood, ’round and ’round,
Yea, ’round and ’round as in a whirlpool’s reach.

And, in a nook that lulls the wilder whine,
A shaggy bush claims kinship with the pine
And meets the gale with boldness in its speech;

Or, with a thought for some far woodland, dense,
Her branches wail against an old offense —
Complaining of the hoof that brought them here.

No lordly tree this land shall ever dare;
And yet, unfearful of their valiant fare,
Soon, in this vast, shall frailest flowers appear.

Where Might doth falter, Beauty enters in;
Where Pride shall fail, Humility shall win.
And this will be until the heavens are old.

And here, to prove the adage, I shall pass
When April kindles beauty in the grass
And warms these frozen fields with red and gold.

~~
Wilson MacDonald (1880-1967)
from Out of the Wilderness, 1926

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]

Wilson MacDonald biography

Jakub Fryš, Prairie of Alberta, February 2019. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.