A Scent Of Sage And Prairie Wind Poem by Gordon R Menzies

A Swainson hawk sits on a weathered post
where no border was ever meant to be,
peppered brown, fused to the wood of it,
with ragged remnant of a ground squirrel
torn from the meadow where his kin cried
suddenly, limp in bright yellow talons near
where we lay dreaming in the sunlit sage
warm blue-green wilderland sage, alive
on a Badlands morning in meadow flower
and the delicious haze of its own perfume
where lowing, swish-tailed patchworks
of half-wild cattle roam above the hoodoos
the red melting cake landscape ripped out
by ancient thrusts of glacial water roaring
we watch tightrope-walking harvest ants
and pensive spur-throated grasshoppers
on stems of buffalo grass and wonder at
the abundance of prairie flower this day
and the gilded multitudes of endless grass
the green-gold going on and on of it all
where a lone house sits abandoned, with
echoing eyeless shadow-filled windows
falling into the prairie soil in fragments
carried off by ants that know this land
was never meant for such permanence
where even the people who built this
were carried off like smoke in the wind
and even we two can feel the pull of it, in
our raving hair and in the skin of our faces
this stretch was meant only for the grass
this is where the wind lives and rules, and
holds court with winged things that see
and green swaying things that bow to it