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Writer's pictureCarol Spangler

Flower Fed Buffalo

This is for Mother’s Day, in honor of all women, men, children who have served and are serving as role models, support personnel, care givers, kind people, and compassionate team workers for the betterment of life. You have filled the role as someone who helped and appreciated another person, big or small. You have mothered a person in need of care at one time or another. Know you made and do make a difference.


My mother often read poetry. She loved words and colorful phrases. I remember “The Flower-Fed Buffaloes” as one of her favorites. It always made me cry, as a child, as she read it aloud on a hot summer afternoon. The official Kansas animal, the buffalo – actually “bison” – seems to represent the changes of life for people, flora and fauna. The moving and changing part is felt in all creation.


Here's the poem for you to enjoy. Happy Mother’s Day! Thanks for being you.



Buffalo at Wind Cave National Park, Black Hills, South Dakota, 1948. | Hultstrand and F.A. Pazandak Photograph Collections, Library of Congress

The Flower-Fed Buffaloes


The flower-fed buffaloes of the spring In the days of long ago, Ranged where the locomotives sing And the prairie flowers lie low: — The tossing, blooming, perfumed grass Is swept away by the wheat, Wheels and wheels and wheels spin by In the spring that still is sweet. But the flower-fed buffaloes of the spring Left us, long ago. They gore no more, they bellow no more, They trundle around the hills no more: — With the Blackfeet, lying low, With the Pawnees, lying low, Lying low.


“The Flower-Fed Buffaloes” by Vachel Lindsay from Going to the Stars. © D. Appleton & Company, 1926. Reprinted with permission.

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