There are strange shadows fostered of the moon,
More numerous than the clear-cut shade of day....
Go forth, when all the leaves whisper of June,
Into the dusk of swooping bats at play;
Or go into that late November dusk
When hills take on the noble lines of death,
And on the air the faint, astringent musk
Of rotting leaves pours vaguely troubling breath.
Then shall you see shadows whereof the sun,
Knows nothing—aye, a thousand shadows there
Shall leap and flicker and stir and stay and run,
Like petrels of the changing foul or fair;
Like ghosts of twilight, of the moon, of him
Whose homeland lies past each horizon’s rim....
_Badger Clark_
Badger Clark was born at Albia, Iowa, in 1883. He moved to Dakota
Territory at the age of three months and now lives in the Black
Hills of South Dakota.
Clark is one of the few men who have lived to see their work become
part of folk-lore; many of his songs having been adapted and
paraphrased by the cowboys who have made them their own. A version
of one of his poems (“The Glory Trail”), after wide circulation
among the ranchers and cow-punchers, was printed as an example of
anonymous folk-song in _Poetry; A Magazine of Verse_ under the title
“High-Chin Bob”—and credited to “Author Unknown.”
_Sun and Saddle Leather_ (1915) and _Grass-Grown Trails_ (1917) are
the expression of a native singer; happy, spontaneous and seldom
“literary.” There is wind in these songs; the smell of camp-smoke
and the colors of prairie sunsets rise from them. Free, for the most
part, from affectations, Clark achieves an unusual ease in his use
of the local vernacular.