American Literature class is reading Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! Cather prefaces her novel with her poem “Prairie Spring,” celebrating the “earthy dusk” of springtime in Nebraska. When asked to “celebrate” springtime in Rancho Mirage in verse, senior Aaron Berenzweig and junior Trey Lucatero penned these replies.
Prairie Spring
—Willa Cather
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 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 unsupportable sweetness,
Its fierce necessity,
Its sharp desire,
Singing and singing,
Out of the lips of silence,
Out of the earthy dusk.
Spring Time for Aaron
— Aaron Berenzweig edition
As the sun rises from behind the little San Bernardino Mountains,
our quaint little valley slowly rises.
Golf courses get their daily shave and rinse;
old people everywhere climb out of bed to take blood pressure medication;
tourists put a new roll of film into disposable cameras;
and Aaron struggles to realize that our valley has seasons,
even a spring time!
Spring Time for Trey
— Trey Lucatero edition
The heat of spring
kindles the very fire
of my misery.
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