O Pioneers!

I read Willa Cather's book this week, O Pioneers. I heartily recommend it. Here is a passage that resonated for me. Living on the prairie, it reminds me daily how flimsy and fleeting our individual lives are....

"Suppose I do will my land to their children, what difference will that make? The land belongs to the future; that's the way it seems to me. How many of the names on the county clerk's plat will be there in fifty years? I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother's childrenn. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it--for a little while."

What moved me even more was her poem that she used as a preface:
Prairie Spring

Evening and the flat land,
Rich and sombre and always silent;
The miles of fresh-plowed soil,
Heavy and black, full of strength and harshness;
The growing wheat, the growing weeds,
The toiling horses, the tired men;
The long empty roads,
Sullen fires of sunset, fading;
The eternal, unresponsive sky.
Against all this, Youth,
Flaming like the wild roses,
Singing like the larks over the plowed fields,
Flashing like a star out of the twilight;
Youth with its insupportable sweetness,
Its fierce necessity;
Its sharp desire,
Singing and singing,
Out of the lips of silence,
Out of the earthy dusk.