Kansas Waste Land

KANSAS WASTE LAND

KANSAS WASTE LAND

One really doesn’t—

Have to be like Eliot’s

Famous Clairvoyante

Madame Sosostris—

A gypsy fortune teller

With a deck of cards

To know a Waste Land—

When she sees one like Kansas

Like Louisa Jones

Alabama was—

Her home way down there

Down in the Deep South

ENDLESS PRAIRIES

The Jones Z-Bar Ranch—

Way out in the middle of

The Tall Grass Prairie

It went on and on—

What’s simply more spectral

And lonely out there?

Than all that rolling—

Prairie Vernacular land

Without Renaissance?

Despite the Palace—

Stephen Jones built for lovely

Louisa his wife?

LOUISA JONES

She wasn’t merely—

A poor poverty-stricken

Sad Prairie Housewife

She was a Southern Belle—

Used to the pleasures and the

Dixie social life

She brought along with—

Her several black servants

A maid, butler, cook

After all, she came—

From an Antebellum home

Plantation with slaves

CATTLEMAN’S WIFE

Steven Jones lavished—

Louisa with his stylish

Grandiose Z-Bar

Truly a Southern—

Plantation palace way out

There in the Waste Land

But even Nineteenth—

Century Renaissance class

Just wasn’t enough

Just a little pool—

For her goldfish out front

Her only pleasure

THE STAIRCASE

She never came down—

The ornate costly staircase

She stayed in her room

Nor did she use the—

Classy old limestone out-house 

Behind the Mansion

She used a little—

Chamber-pot rather than the

Rude toilet out there

Her maid brought her meals—

Her butler answered the door

Her cook was superb

THE FIREPLACE

Jones sat around the—

Livingroom fireplace at night

Brooding about it

His Chase County dream—

Just hadn’t worked out quite like

The way he wanted

Cattleman’s Empire—

A Palace out on the Plains

And yet a failure

His Prairie Mansion—

Somehow had become haunted

His wife a stranger