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Blackland Prairie
BLACKLAND PRAIRIE
From Red River down to San Antone,
The Blackland Prairie’s all but gone—
Scoured clean by progress, tilled and torn,
By “civilized” greed, excess born,
A plundered land that mourns the dawn.
Where bison and pronghorn used to roam
In numbers lost in time and stone
Now parking lots and outlet malls
Stretch gray and wide in sterile sprawl—
Concrete vice buries the loam.
Ghosts drift where tall grass once did sway,
Sad silhouettes lost in furrowed clay.
Buffalo wallows—now just names—
Erased beneath the plow’s steel frames.
That black gumbo soil, wild and deep,
Swells in sorrow where once it did sleep,
Its spirit stripped for cotton’s cash—
The prairie buried and turned to ash.
And the prairie wept.
Fire was its father,
Rain its sacred hymn.
Crickets echoed softly
As the dusk grew dim.
Bluestem bowed low
To the buffalo’s tread;
Fields stitched with wildflowers—
Blazing red and violet spread.
Nature held her courts
In the Blackland meadows.
But the prairie wept.
Now less than one percent remains
To carry what the prairie claims—
Memory stitched in roadside seams,
Shadowed by asphalt and lost dreams.
That “Blackland gold” once vast and grand
Now clings in patches along the land.
Switchgrass, Grama, Indiangrass—
A lineage mown too short too fast.
Their names replaced by foreign green:
Bermuda's blade and Augustine.
And still, the prairie weeps.
Copyright ©
Danny Derden
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