There's land where yet no ditchers dig
Nor cranks experiment;
It's only lovely, free and big
And isn't worth a cent.
I pray that them who come to spoil
May wait till I am dead
Before they foul that blessed soil
With fence and cabbage head.
Yet it's squeak! squeak! squeak!
Far and farther crawls the wire!
To crowd and pinch another inch
Is all their heart's desire.
The world is over-stocked with men,
And some will see the day
When each must keep his little pen,
But I'll be far away.
When my old soul hunts range and rest
Beyond the last divide,
Just plant me in some stretch of West
[p. 167] That's sunny, lone and wide.
Let cattle rub my tombstone down
And coyotes mourn their kin,
Let hawses paw and tramp the moun',—
But don't you fence it in!
Oh, it's squeak! squeak! squeak!
And they pen the land with wire.
They figure fence and copper cents
Where we laughed round the fire.
Job cussed his birthday, night and morn
In his old land of Uz,
But I'm just glad I wasn't born
No later than I wuz!
Charles Badger Clark, Jr.
THE GILA MONSTER ROUTE
THE lingering sunset across the plain
Kissed the rear-end door of an east-bound train,
And shone on a passing track close by
Where a ding-bat sat on a rotting tie.
He was ditched by a shock and a cruel fate.
The con high-balled, and the manifest freight
Pulled out on the stem behind the mail,
And she hit the ball on a sanded rail.
As she pulled away in the falling light
He could see the gleam of her red tail-light.
Then the moon arose and the stars came out —
He was ditched on the Gila Monster Route.