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.

A Cowboy’s Prayer
by Badger Clark

Oh Lord, I’ve never lived where churches grow.
    I love creation better as it stood
That day You finished it so long ago
    And looked upon Your work and called it good.
I know that others find You in the light
    That’s sifted down through tinted window panes,
And yet I seem to feel You near tonight
    In this dim, quiet starlight on the plains.

I thank You, Lord, that I am placed so well,
    That You have made my freedom so complete;
That I’m no slave of whistle, clock or bell,
    Nor weak-eyed prisoner of wall and street.
Just let me live my life as I’ve begun
    And give me work that’s open to the sky;
Make me a pardner of the wind and sun,
    And I won’t ask a life that’s soft or high.

Let me be easy on the man that’s down;
    Let me be square and generous with all.
I’m careless sometimes, Lord, when I’m in town,
    But never let ‘em say I’m mean or small!
Make me as big and open as the plains,
    As honest as the hawse between my knees,
Clean as the wind that blows behind the rains,
    Free as the hawk that circles down the breeze!

Forgive me, Lord, if sometimes I forget.
    You know about the reasons that are hid.
You understand the things that gall and fret;
    You know me better than my mother did.
Just keep an eye on all that’s done and said
    And right me, sometimes, when I turn aside,
And guide me on the long, dim, trail ahead
    That stretches upward toward the Great Divide.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.