The Corn Husker

HARD by the Indian lodges, where the bush

  Breaks in a clearing, through ill-fashioned fields,

She comes to labour, when the first still hush

  Of autumn follows large and recent yields.

Age in her fingers, hunger in her face,

  Her shoulders stooped with weight of work and years,

But rich in tawny colouring of her race,

  She comes a-field to strip the purple ears.

And all her thoughts are with the days gone by,

  Ere might's injustice banished from their lands

Her people, that to-day unheeded lie,

  Like the dead husks that rustle through her hands.

E. Pauline Johnson

The Indian Corn Planter

HE needs must leave the trapping and the chase,

  For mating game his arrows ne'er despoil,

And from the hunter's heaven turn his face,

  To wring some promise from the dormant soil.

He needs must leave the lodge that wintered him,

  The enervating fires, the blanket bed--

The women's dulcet voices, for the grim

  Realities of labouring for bread.

So goes he forth beneath the planter's moon

  With sack of seed that pledges large increase,

His simple pagan faith knows night and noon,

  Heat, cold, seedtime and harvest shall not cease.

And yielding to his needs, this honest sod,

  Brown as the hand that tills it, moist with rain,

Teeming with ripe fulfillment, true as God,

  With fostering richness, mothers every grain.

E. Pauline Johnson