Threads of Sky

Paul Horgan

Where they go, men carry with them fire.
Whole firmaments aspire
In smoke and flight of spark
To change the light, or counter dark.
Now comes, in the bowing fields of grain
Where unseen rain
Slants from the sun to bend down golden stalks,
Where prairie hawks
Fly astounded and ponies dance,
Now comes advance
Of the singing men with hammer and spike.
Into the wooden ties their irons strike.
Like threads of sky
The steel rails lie.
From powder and ball
The robbed Indians fall.
Silence forever master of the fields,
A silence of thunder and of creatures, yields
To the bring of chains and fiery furnace,
The shout of the one-eyed beast in harness
To pistons buckled and thrust by steam;
With cyclops gleam
In the sighing grasses of evening;
Horizon-plume of smoke fading, deadening
Under the plumy mid-American night.
The engines charge the mountains; a new might
Leaves the watery grain,
The wide-lain
Prairies, and the river-woven hills.
The railroad fills
The black-pine green and the shadow-blue
With white steam breath. Breaking through
The immemorial hush of stone,
The whistles moan.