"Crossing the Plains."

"Crossing the Plains."

Long day on day, and longer week on week,

      Across vast prairies, lit by cloud or sky

      Caught in some wild flower’s pink or violet eye,

Winds on the weary train. Patient and meek,

The stumbling oxen go; on desert’s bleak

     And scorched, some worn-out horse is left to lie

     Awhile, abandoned, suffering—then to die,

With vultures poised above. The mountains reek

With coolness, but below the plains stretch white

     And hot. Illness, hunger, thirst, doubt, despair,

     Know they; yet struggle on ‘twixt hopes and sighs,

Until, at last, from some far western height,

     Through lips of dawn bursts, like a passionate prayer,

     The blue Pacific ‘neath their blood-veined eyes.

A newspaper clipping of the poem printed in West Shore magazine, courtesy of the Ella Higginson Papers, Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, Heritage Resources, Western Washington University, Bellingham WA.