Charles Badger Clark Poems

The daybreak comes so pure and still.
He said that I was pure as dawn,
That day we climbed to Signal Hill.
...

I ride alone and hate the boys I meet.
Today, some way, their laughin' hurts me so.
I hate the mockin'-birds in the mesquite-
And yet I liked 'em just a week ago.
...

Jeff Hart rode out of the gulch to war
When the low sun yellowed the pines.
He waved to his folks in the cabin door
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Out from the ranch on a Saturday night,
Ridin' a hawse that's a shootin' star,
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We're the children of the open and we hate the haunts o' men,
But we had to come to town to get the mail.
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Kissed me from the saddle, and I still can feel it burning,
But he must have felt it cold, for ice was in my veins.
I shall always see him as he waved above the turning,
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I reared your fathers long ago —
Big, savage children — from the breast,
But in the circle of my glow
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There's an old pard of mine that sits by his door
And watches the evenin' skies.
He's sat there a thousand evenin's before
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There's a song in the canyon below me
And a song in the pines overhead,
As the sunlight crawls down from the snowline
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'The trail is long to the bison herd,
The prairie rotten with rain,
And look! the wings of the thunder bird
...