The Prairie Town by Helen Santmyer

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend June 28, 2014   The Prairie Town   Helen Santmyer

Lovers of beauty laugh at this grey town,      Where dust lies thick on ragged curb-side trees, And compass-needle streets lead up and down      And lose themselves in empty prairie seas. Here is no winding scented lane, no hill      Crowned with a steepled church, no garden wall Of old grey stone where lilacs bloom, and fill      The air with fragrance when the May rains fall. But here is the unsoftened majesty      Of the wide earth where all the wide streets end, And from the dusty corner one may see      The full moon rise, and flaming sun descend. The long main street, whence farmers’ teams go forth, Lies like an old sea road, star-pointed north.            This poem is in the public domain. About This Poem   “The Prairie Town” by Helen Santmyer was published in The Bookman Anthology of Verse in December 1921.   Helen Santmyer was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1895. She attended and later taught at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Her poetry appeared in anthologies and journals, however her most famous work, And Ladies of the Club (Ohio State University Press, 1982), was published just a few years before her death in 1986. Work by Santmyer   And Ladies of the Club (Berkley Trade, 2000) “Inland” by Chase Twichell “Prairie Spring” by Willa Cather “To make a prairie (1755)” by Emily Dickinson Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038