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PrintA Narrow Trail
C&I's Poem of the Week for 2/8/2012
Warm with rain, morning arrives,
cloaking red earth, yellow grass,
turning a hunter’s ravine copper in the dawning light.
Elk, mule deer, antelope water at the lake,
magpie and mockingbird call across a juniper grove.
Sans Arc Sioux wake on the far side.
At Fort Lincoln, a Forsyth scout
pays fifty dollars for a Spencer repeater.
With good Remington revolvers,
a buckskin horse made for the long country,
I range the Powder River, the Bighorn Mountains,
marking trail for Three Stars Crook.
I look for settling sign of Cheyenne and Oglala,
for sign of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull.
Custer paid the 7th on the march.
The Army paper still floats and flutters along the Rosebud.
Wolves scatter what Gibbon’s detail left half-done:
officers buried inches deep, death stakes marked on a map;
troopers covered by hasty heaps of dust or pine bough.
I swing out through the late summer hills,
scraps of money secured in my saddle bags.
Not friendly--but not who I look for,
I’ll leave this tribe for another rider, another regiment.
Working wide and northwest,
I’ll try the creek-run meadows beyond Harney Peak.
Cook fires blaze up. A dog’s bark carries, high and thin.
I leave them busy with their muffled, waking day.
C&I's poem of the week for 02/08/2012. To submit your poems for consideration, please send them to mail@cowboysindians.com with "poetry" in the subject line. Selected entries will appear online.
