Poetry

The Heroes of my West.

Joaquin Miller


  • I stand upon the green Sierra's wall;
  • Toward the east, beyond the yellow grass,
  • I see the broken hill-tops lift and fall,
  • Then sands that shimmer like a sea of glass....
  • There lies the nation's great high road of dead.
  • Forgotten aye, unnumber'd, and, alas !
  • Unchronicled in deed or death; instead,
  • The new aristocrat lifts high a lordly head.

  • My brave and unremember'd heroes, rest;
  • You fell in silence, silent lie and sleep.
  • Sleep on unsung, for this, I say, were best:
  • The world to-day has hardly time to weep;
  • The world to-day will hardly care to keep
  • In heart her plain and unpretending brave.
  • The desert winds, they whistle by and sweep
  • About you; brown'd and russet grasses wave
  • Along a thousand leagues that lie one common grave.

  • The proud and careless pass in palace car
  • Along the line you blazon'd white with bones;
  • Pass swift to people, and possess and mar
  • Your lands with monuments and letter'd stones
  • Unto themselves. Thank God! this waste disowns
  • Their touch. His everlasting hand, has drawn
  • A shining line around you. Wealth bemoans
  • The waste your splendid grave employs. Sleep on,
  • No hand shall touch your dust this side of God and dawn.

  • I let them stride across with grasping hands
  • And strive for brief possession; mark and line
  • With lifted walls the new divided lands,
  • And gather growing herds of lowing kine
  • I could not covet these, could not confine
  • My heart to one; all seem'd to me the same,
  • And all below my mountain home, divine
  • And beautiful, held in another's name,
  • As if the herds and lands were mine,
  • All mine or his, all beautiful the same.

  • I have not been, shall not be, understood;
  • I have not wit, nor will, to well explain,
  • But that which men call good I find not good.
  • The lands the savage held, shall hold again,
  • The gold the savage spurn'd in proud disdain
  • For centuries; go, take them all; build high
  • Your gilded temples; strive and strike and strain
  • And crowd and controvert and curse and lie
  • In church and State, in town and citadel, and....die.

  • And who shall grow the nobler from it
  • The mute and unsung savage loved as true,—
  • He felt, as grateful felt, God's blessings fall
  • About his lodge and tawny babes as you
  • In temples,—Moslem, Christian, infidel, or Jew.
  • ....The sea, the great white, braided, bounding sea,
  • Is laughing in your face; the arching blue
  • Remains to God; the mountains still are free,
  • A refuge for the few remaining tribes and me.

  • Your cities! from the first the hand of God
  • Has been against them; sword and flood and flame,
  • The earthquake's march, and pestilence, have trod
  • To undiscerning dust the very name
  • Of antique capitals; and still the same
  • Sad destiny besets the battlefields
  • Of Mammon and the harlot's house of shame.
  • Lo! man with monuments and lifted shields
  • Against his city's fate. A flame! his city yields.