Songs of Sac Prairie - Selections

Snowy Night

Hushes in the stubbled corn,

Along the fence line,

Comes, windless, down on pasture’s edge,

The snow.

In the lit town the fine flakes sifting down

Make the streetlights show as flowers, chrysanthemums.

Snow lies thickening white on boles, on fence posts,

And under lamplight bright as day.

The solitary walker on his lonely round

Hearing whispered, wordless voices all around,

Would not think anything so animate, so white,

Could come out of so dark a world as night.

Froly

​

Sunlight pools in his hot brown eyes

Where he drowses on the hill

To watch the summer going by.

Fourteen, he has no cares;

He lies with sun warm in his eyes.

Gazes on the hawk

That floats upon the blue above.

Fourteen, he disdains love;

No heartache, he knows joy!

Fourteen, five feet of boy,

He lies in summer sun watching summer pass

Like a bull snake in the grass.

Fourteen.

Lily Manzer

​

Safe in her rind of life, shorn of her bloom,

Poor Lily sat in the window of her room,

Day and night, lost in the jungle of her mind.

Delicate, frail, the happy child she was

Had grown by priestly wickedness

Into this pale, weak-minded woman kept alone.

She lived in her dark, narrow room

Until she took a narrower, more dark.

In the weft and loom of life

She was early broken by all she trusted.

All her love unspoken, all her life held down,

All her dreams alone.

She is no lonelier beneath her stone.

A Book of Poems by Robert Frost

​

Every man sets out upon his own,

Begins alone, and ends alone.

Even a point like earth in space

Could be a dark and devious place.

And a man could go astray

For lack of signs along the way.

In search of his own Walden he could meet

Many inviting byways, many a primrose street,

Unless he had a guide to keep from getting lost:

Thoreau, or a book of poems by Robert Frost.