What Is and What Is No More, Progress?

Two poems of change,

Buffalo Dusk

The buffalo are gone.

And those who saw the buffaloes are gone.

Those who saw the buffaloes by the thousands and how they

     pawed the prairie sod into dust with their  hoofs,

     their great heads down pawing on in a great pageant

     of dusk,

those who saw the buffaloes are gone,

And the buffaloes are gone. 


-----Carl Sandburg




The Flower-Fed Buffaloes

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:--

With the Blackfeet lying low,

With the Pawnee lying low.

--------Vachel Lindsay



These  two poets, born a year apart, were both members of the Chicago School of Poets.