Poem of the Day: ‘A Cowboy’s Prayer’

Badger Clark (1883–1957) is the most important link between the Cowboy Poets who had actually experienced the old West and the later, more nostalgic poets of the first half of the twentieth century, writing after the closing of the frontier. Brought up the son of a Methodist circuit rider in the Dakota Territory, he began to compose poetry in 1906, while tending a remote ranch in Arizona, where he had moved to seek relief from his tuberculosis. Among the poems he wrote at the time was “A Border Affair,” which is the basis of the much-recorded song, “Spanish Is the Loving Tongue” — often credited as “Traditional.” But that was the fate of Clark’s work, his successful poems often reprinted without credit. Living in a cabin in the Black Hills the last thirty years of his life (named the first poet laureate of South Dakota in 1937), he collected over fifty versions of today’s Poem of the Day, “A Cowboy’s Prayer,” all credited to “Anonymous.” Underappreciated is Clark’s sophisticated awareness of poetry, and in the simple voice he adopted, he manages a Romantic expression of seeking God in nature.