Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/718

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HISTORY OF OREGON LITERATURE
Of sounding ocean beaches
And glens of golden shade;
I hear your voices calling,
Like thunder through the foam,
The voice of love enthralling
To win the sailor home.

Who would not love you,
Beautiful Oregon,
Wonderland of wilderness and lea.
The heavens above you
Have set their hearts upon
The glory of your mountains and your sea.


26

PAUL E. TRACY

Paul E. Tracy of Baker County is a plumber by trade. He spent his boyhood in Southern Idaho, attended the College of Idaho at Caldwell, and has been a fanner—"dry land and damp"—a lineman and a soldier. He is married and has one son. Dr. H. G. Merriam, editor of Frontier and Midland, who has published several of his poems since 1928, says of him: "His sense of values is independent and discriminating. Literature means to him life and not escape from life." If he keeps on, sustaining his quality and increasing his too slender output, there is a specal place for him in Oregon literature as the comprehensive interpreter of all the country between the Cascades and the Snake. When, with continuing inclusion of the aspects of that region, he has added enough poems of equal merit to "Horsemeat", "Circuit Rider", "Horned Toad" and "Westerners", he will have the first volume to give a full poetic description of Eastern Oregon, not merely its desert, its cattle ranges, its Indans or its round-up.

"Wild Horses"

First 19 lines of the poem called "Horsemeat"

Wild horses are always feeding in Eastern Oregon.
They nibble at noon. They browse in the twilight.
Even in the darkness they rattle the balsam-root leaves.
They eat the dry grass until thirst sets them trotting
In dusty strings miles and miles to water. They trot . . .
Tireless as watch springs. All summer these horses,