Woman of the High Plains, 1938

Once, as a girl, I walked
to where the rolling begins,
and laid in the loamy fields
of bluestem grasses
blanketed by hackberry.
And I didn’t know it,
but the buffalo were following
the cry of the Apache
over the Canadian River,
leaving the land for the cotton tracks
and the valleys of black oil.
So you will understand
that I cannot cross again
into the canyonlands.
What is missing, I fear,
is part of me,
that truth, like the soil,
stripped and burning.