The Plains! The shouting drivers at the wheel; The crash of leather whips; the crush and roll Of wheels; the groan of yokes and grinding steel And iron chain, and lo! at last the whole Vast line, that reached as if to touch the goal, Began to stretch and stream away and wind Toward the west, as if with one control: Then hope loom’d fair, and home lay far behind; Before, the boundless plain, and fiercest of their kind. At first the way lay green and fresh as seas, And far away as any reach of wave; The sunny streams went by in belt of trees; And here and there the tassell’d tawny brave Swept by on horse, looked back, stretched forth and gave A yell of hell, and then did wheel and rein Awhile and point away, dark-brow’d and grave, Into the far and dim and distant plain With signs and prophecies, and then plunged on again. Some hills at last began to lift and break; Some streams began to fail of wood and tide, The somber plain began betime to take A hue of weary brown, and wild and wide It stretch’d its naked breast on every side. A babe was heard at last to cry for bread Amid the deserts; cattle low’d and died, And dying men went by with broken tread, And left a long black serpent line of wreck and dead. Strange hunger’d birds, black-wing’d and still as death, And crown’d of red and hooked beaks, flew low And close about till we could touch their breath— Strange unnamed birds, that seem’d to come and go In circles now, and now direct and slow, Continual, yet never touch the earth; Slim foxes shied and shuttled to and fro At times across the dusty weary dearth Of life, looked back, then sank like crickets in a hearth. Then dust arose, a long dim line like smoke From out of riven earth. The wheels went groaning by, The thousand feet in harness, and in yoke, They tore the ways of ashen alkali, And desert winds blew sudden, swift, and dry. The dust! It sat upon and fill’d the train. It seem’d to fret and fill the very sky. Lo! dust upon the beasts, the tent, the plain, And dust, alas! on breasts that rose not up again. They sat in desolation and in dust By dried-up desert streams; the mother’s hands Hid all her bended face; the cattle thrust Their tongues and faintly called across the lands. The babes that knew not what the way through sands Could mean, did ask if it would end today. The panting wolves slid by, red-eyed, in bands To pools beyond. The men look’d far away, And silent deemed that all a boundless desert lay.