The Breaking Plow

The Breaking Plow.
223.12

I am the plow that turns the sod
That has lain for a thousand years;
Where the prairie’s wind-tossed Bewars nod
And the wolf her wild enb rears,
I come, and in my wake, like rain,
In scattered the golden seed;
I change the leagues of lonely plain
To fruitful gardens and fields of grain
For men and their hungry breed.

I greet the earth in its rosy morn,
I am the first to stir the soil;
I bring the glory of wheat and corn
For the crowning of those who toil.
I am civilization’s seal and sign;
Yes, I am the mighty pen
That writes the sod with a pledge divine- A promise to pay with bread and wine
For the sweat of honest men.

I am the end of things that were,
And the birth of things to be;
My coming makes the earth to atir
With a new and strange deeree
After its slumbers, deep and long.
I waken the droway sod.
And sow my furrow with lifts of song
To glad the heart of the mighty throng,
Slow feeling the way to God.

A thousand summers the prairie rose
Has gisddened the hermit bee,
A thousand winters the drifting snowe
Have whitened the grassy sea;
Before me curls the wavering smoke
Of the Indian’s amoldering dre;
Behind me rise-was it God who spoke?
At the toil-enchanted hammer’s stroke,
The town and the glittering spire.

I give the soll to the one who does,
For the joy of him and his:
I rouse the slumbering world that
To the diligent world that is.
O seer, with vision that looks away
A thousand years from now,
The marvelous nation your eyes survey
Was born of the purpose that here today
Is guiding the breaking plow.
-Nixon Waterman