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DAVID MIDDLETON
DATE: 1999
To the memory of Andrew Lytle
We left the Carolinas in our prime
Exhausted by those bleak depleted fields
And like our fathers sought a virgin earth
Not on the eastern coastland with its waves
That brought us here from Europe's colder shores
But to the west far inland till we came
Beyond the Rio Flores to a place
Of buckled wolds uprisen from a sea
Whose salt and sand still glint in sandy hills
And saline springs that bubble from the domes.
We stopped somewhere beyond the Ouachita
In wilderness that struck bewildered eyes
As Adam's land unplowed six thousand years,
And there we swore to stay and break the soil
That we might eat its fruit as God's own words
And be at once the thing we taste and say,
Old cloven roots abloom in man and earth.
To all we saw we gave those common names
That brought the sheer appearances so near
In iron-capped hills braced against Arctic winds
Or bottomlands weighed down with graded clays,
And there in time the trees of Eden rose--
Red oak and blackjack oak, loblolly pine,
And spread along the green primeval streams
Or raft lakes rising and falling with the Red
The dogwood, hawthorn, cypress, water elm,
Overcup oak, and willows near the bogs
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Clotted with bloodroot, aster, goldenrod.
Such things declared the seasons in their prime
And in their rugged coverture secured
That ground from which in our own tongue there came
Strains of an ancient anthem of the land,
A floral oratorio proclaimed
By plighted light so holy to behold:
The twayblade and the nodding indigo,
White mayhaws slashing wild through dandelions,
The early buttercups and lyre-leaved sage
Turning the springtime pastures pink and blue,
And resurrection ferns that feather the oaks
With leaves made green...