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