Little House on the Prairie

It’s almost fraud, the way they sold the show:
Opening theme ringing with triumphant notes,
credits hung on sunlit meadows, winning smiles
on the perfect faces of Ma and Pa, aglow with hope.

Ten minutes in, most hopes will be dashed—
added to a vast catalog of broken frontier dreams.
As soon as their first little house was Kansas-built,
prairie fire lit the barn and singed the cow.

Then all had to be abandoned. Osage Indians
and the US Government moved the territory line,
making the family nomads again. All else, 
given time, would also come to naught,

or bare survival. Wind storms and draughts,
scarlet fever making Mary blind, smoking boys
burn a school and kill a little sister, and just when 
a rich man says he’ll pay for reconstruction,

that rich man dies, revealing nothing but debt.
A drug-addicted soldier dies disappointing his ma.
Taxes and liens take the happy immigrant’s farm.
Old crook swindles Walnut Grovers out of savings.

For a new plow, Pa puts the oxen up for collateral,
then breaks his ribs before he can finish the work
that wins the plow… and if Caroline can forge 
her way to town with eggs and dignity intact,

then she must face Mrs Oleson’s withering words
and snotty, peppermint-wielding children.
Nelly Oleson’s bonnet-and-sneer alone could send 
anyone to the edge of ill will. But life’s snarls

can be combed out by a kind word from Charles,
and nary a falseness can stand up to his fiddle.
Barns burn on the righteous and the cruel alike,
and Minnesota blizzards make more orphans.

Mr Edwards fell on drunken, dark days
after smallpox killed his wife and daughter, 
but he dumped his resentment of an uncaring God
for the chance to sit by a widow in church.

Just when you thought it was safe to smile
at the lifelong struggle of Harriet and Nels
over haughty pettiness vs human decency,
here comes Caroline’s false pregnancy,

Albert’s morphine addiction, the abandonment
of the town, and old man Hansen’s stroke
leaving him broken and lost in total darkness.
Inevitably, they dynamite the whole town.

Then as if to yank us all away from the smorgasbord
of misery and mortality we’ve been served,
every episode wraps with the cheeriest tune
as Laura and her sisters tumble down a slope

of eternal wildflowers, as if entering Elysium
through a cosmic meadow of blossoming joy.