Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, April 16th, 2025.

Today's poem comes from that great American voice, Carl Sandberg, and it's called Buffalo Dusk.

I'll read it once, say a few words, and then read it one more time.

Buffalo Dusk

The buffaloes are gone, and those who saw the buffaloes are gone.

Those who saw the buffaloes by thousands, and how they pawed the prairie sod into dust with

their hooves, their great heads down, pawing on in a great pageant of dusk.

Those who saw the buffaloes are gone, and the buffaloes are gone.

Strzegoves are gone. Structurally, this poem is what's called a kiasm or kiasmus, and it's this kind of accordion-like

symmetrical literary structure in which the extreme beginning and extreme end are parallels or

bookends or restatements of the same idea. And then the second statement and the second to last

statement are similarly parallels or echoes or simply the same line repeated in both places.

And this pattern continues, depending on the length of the chasm, until a central idea is reached.

And this is kind of the heart of the structure.

And so there's this movement down and in to the main idea and then movement back out and up to the surface again.

And sometimes this inward and then outward movement is done without any change to the bookends.

Sometimes the second set of statements are modified

somehow by the experience you had with the central idea. Here the poem opens with this kind of

abstract lament. The buffaloes are gone. And then the poem deepens that lament by remarking that

even those who saw the buffaloes are gone. They don't even exist in living memory anymore.

And then something remarkable happens. We've moved from these vague statements to the heart of this short poem, where something very concrete is offered instead, and all of a sudden, all at once, the buffaloes aren't gone.

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