The Flower Fed Buffalo

Just a short distance from my house is a pasture where a herd of buffalo reside. I don't know who owns them or what they do with them, but I am amazed and humbled everytime I see them. So large and yes, majestic. This spring all of the cows had fuzzy red calves. It's so hard to imagine that they are confined to a pasture with only a few strands of barbed wire when all of the land here once belonged to them. Ghosts from days gone by. I also love this poem by Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931).

The Flower Fed Buffalo

The flower-fed buffaloes of the spring,

In the days of long ago,

Ranged where the locomotives sing,

And the prairie flowers lie low;

The tossing, blooming, perfumed grass,

Is swept away by wheat,

Wheels and wheels and wheels spin by,

In the spring that still is sweet.

But the flower-fed buffaloes of the spring,

Left us long ago.

They gore no more, they bellow no more,

They trundle around the hills no more:

With the Blackfeet lying low,

With the Pawnees lying low.