Poem of the Week
July 24, 2006
by
Edwin Ford Piper
The prairie cleft by skirmish lines of fence---
High-headed longhorns bound for pastures new---
Torn denim fluttering and profane dispraise---
The sod house and the ranks of silking corn,
But, oh, the crippled horses at the plough !
Dobbin was mettlesome two years ago ;
But he'll prance no more, he'll never kick up his
heels,
For one knee crooks out, one leg has a dragging limp ;
He's notched and scarred with gashes. Gray's front
foot
Is doubled in size, stiff, lumpy, hairless, too.
The poor colt pawed that hoof over the fence,
And pulled and sawed for hours. The pine tar
With which we filled the wound did heal it up.
Horses are horses. Curses on barbed wire !
When longhorns overran the settler's land
The herd law would not grant him damages
Unless his crop was fenced. Hail to barbed wire !
It broke the free range, sent the cowman west,---
Cowboys in dimmer distance, riding, riding
Into rich sunset light whence lingering notes
Drift over dusky distances of trail.
" Come on, old Slowfoot, sift along,
We got to make Mud River to-night,
Your ribs is lank and your hair is long,
But a month on the range 'll put you right.
" You're going to wish for the bluestem hay,
And the buffalo grass so sweet and high ;
But you'll get a home on the Cactus Range
If you don't strike too much alkali.
" Good-bye, good-bye to the Frenchman Fork,
To the sandbar mush they call the Platte ;
We'll make our home in the sagebrush hills
Till the Devil puts a fence on that.
" They say that heaven is a free range land,---
Good-bye, good-bye, O fare you well,---
But it's barbed wire for the devil's hat band,
And barbed wire blankets down in hell. "
Reprinted from
The Midland: A Magazine of the Middle West
Iowa City, Iowa & Moorhead, Minnesota
Volume III, No. 1 / January 1917.