In those days when every territory

was a new frontier,

a baby boy clinging to my shoulders,

I dashed up stairway hillsides,

through dining room canyons,

along kitchen trails,

wrestled down bad guys into carpet grass,

hid in ambush behind boulder chairs

 

One early breaking dawn

I woke to find he’d saddled up

with another outfit far beyond

the fences of our old roundup

 

Now that the greenhorn has

galloped to his own Durango,

I’ve hung up my handguns for good

 

Many a night wrapped in a blanket,

I crouch in front of a fireplace

listening to the high winds neigh,

cold and lonely on a prairie

alive with ghosts of the palominos

we rode all the way to Dodge