Ii

In the days of the Sires of the People Came the First-remembered of Men Forth from the wombs of mothering Night, To seek their Sign and to find their Light, And to hew them homes mid the virgin loams, Then, as ever again.

Out of the mists of the past they marched, Children of Earth and of Sky,---- The red-soil land was theirs to claim, The hill-born torrent their flood to tame, And avalanche-thrown was the quarry-stone For their houses builded high.

They gathered them where the valleys smiled, They gathered them, tribe and clan,---- They laid their walls through the sunny days; They broke their fields and they tilled their maize, And they sang them airs and chanted them prayers That come with the joy of man.

Till up from the glowing desert, And up from the wandering plain, The greased and painted warriors crept With sudden whoop on them that slept---- Like wolves in bands from the famished lands,---- And they left a bloody stain.

They ravaged the peaceful farmsteads, They shattered and scattered the folk, And they filled the land with a deathly spell, Where Apache stealth and Comanche yell And the treacherous blow of the Navaho Their nightly terrors woke.

Till the chieftains counselled in sorrow Mid the sound of women’s woe, And they swore to build them a fortress-keep, And to hold their lands, and to sow and reap Where Sacred Earth had given them birth, Whatso might be their foe!

And they set the rocks of their citadel On the mesa’s granite crest, And their terraces rose till the barren space Became a nation’s gathering place, And the red light shone from the stubborn stone Where the People dwelt at rest.

And a new Age dawned and their troubled Morn Passed into the splendid Day; And they sang from their roofs when their work was done High-chanted hymns to the Fathering Sun; And their bows were strong and the arrow’s prong Kept the carrion tribes at bay.

With their cornfields and their beanfields, With their vines of squash and pumpkin, With their sunflowers and tobacco, Dwelt the olden folk of Pecos. ]