Mid-American Prayer

I sang there—I dreamed there—I was suckled face downward in the black earth of my western cornland.I remember as though it were yesterday how I first began to stand up.All about me the corn—in the night the fields mysterious and vast—voices of Indians—names remembered—murmurings of winds—the secret mutterings of my own young boyhood and manhood.The men and women among whom I lived destroyed my ability to pray. The sons of New Englanders, who brought books and smart sayings into our Mid-America, destroyed the faith in me that came out of the ground.But in my own way I crept out beyond that. I did pray—in the night by a strip of broken rail fence—in the rain—walking alone in meadows—in the hundred secret places that youth knows I tried to find the way to gods. Now you see how confusing life is.There were my cornfields that I loved—what whisperings there—what daring dreams—what deep hopes—what memories of true old savages, Indians striving toward gods, dancing and fighting and praying while they said big words—medicine words.And all this in the long cornfields.And then in the fall the crackling of cornleaves, the smells, sights and sounds.The corn stood up like armies in the shocks.

When I was a boy I went into the cornfields at night. I said words I had not dared to say to people, defying the New Englanders' gods, trying to find honest, mid-western American gods.And all the time the fields spread west and west. An empire was building.Towns grew up, factories multiplied.You see the corn had come into its own but that destroyed too.I and my men stood up but we grew fat. We lived in houses in cities and we forgot the fields and the praying—the lurking sounds, sights, smells of old things.Now I am ashamed and many of my men are ashamed.I cannot tell how deep my shame lies.I walk in the streets seeing my own well-clad body and my fat hands with shame.

I am thinking of lean men fighting in many places over the world. I am thinking of the voices of my own gods forgotten in the fields.And now at last after my long fatness I begin to get the old whisperings.I go along here in Chicago praying and saying words. Not the shouting and the waving of flags but something else creeps into me.You see, dear brothers of the world, I dream of new and more subtile loves for me and my men.My mind leaps forward and I think of the time when our hands, no longer fat, may touch even the lean dear hands of France, when we also have suffered and got back to prayer.

Conceive if you will the mightiness of that dream, that these fields and places, out here west of Pittsburgh, may become sacred places, that because of this terrible thing, of which we may now become a part, there is hope of hardness and leanness—that we may get to lives of which we may be unashamed.Above the old half-lost shadows, that lurk over our cornfields, now something more than Indians that dance in the moonlight.Now older, older things—bearded Slavs dreaming far back, stout Englishmen marching under Cromwell, Franks and Celts, presently Scandinavians too.These to our cornfields, the old dreams and prayers and thoughts of these men sweetening our broad land and getting even into our shops and into the shadows that lurk by our factory doors.It is the time of the opening of doors.No talk now of what we can do for the old worldTalk and dream now of what the old world can bring to us—the true sense of real suffering out of which may come the sweeter brotherhood.

God, lead us to the fields now. Suns for us and rains for us and a prayer for every growing thing.May our fields become our sacred places.May we have courage to choke with our man's hate him who would profit by the suffering of the world.May we strip ourself clean and go hungry that after this terrible storm has passed our sacred fields may feed German, Jew and Japanese.May the sound of enmity die in the groaning of growing things in our fields.May we get to gods and the greater brotherhood through growth springing out of the destruction of men.For all of Mid-America the greater prayer and the birth of humbleness.