Out of the West they called me,
And I turned my face to the East,
And there was pride in my going,
As a bridegroom goes to the feast;
Here in the land of legend
And the region of romance,
I should sit at the feet of learning
And charter thought’s advance,
For every eastern hill-top
Was sacred and divine
To the humble prairie plow-boy
Who sought in the East, a sign.

Out of the East I turn me—
God, what my eyes have seen!
From a land of degenerate farmers,
From the Land of the Might Have Been,
From the narrow hills of learning
Where the lamp of truth goes out
And the still, small voice of the spirit
Is drowned in the vulgar shout,
From a land of wanton cities
And dread night things that prey,
I turn my face to the West-land—
God, give me one prairie day!

Give me the blaze of sunshine,
Give me the open sky,
The crude, young strength of manhood
Undrained in harlotry,
Give me a voice that thunders
And wisdom to restrain,
The flail of honest anger,
And pity for men’s pain;
Give me the faith of Kansas,
And a few young men I know,
And we’ll carry the gates of Gaza
And shatter Jericho.

The East is an ulcered carcass,
Bedecked like a courtesan,
The West, like a boy, has heard her call
And flushed through his coat of tan,
He has spent, like Samson,
His body’s strength
For a gaudy finger-ring,
And the East has fettered him body and soul
With a rope of twisted string;
But I cannot keep in silence
The things my eyes have seen,
As I turn to the youth of Kansas
From the Land of the Might Have Been.

Willard Wattles, Sunflowers:
A Book of Kansas Poems, 1914