Exploring The West In My Stick Horse Dreams Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

exploring the West in my stick horse dreams

I gallop not so swiftly over the prairies

and sip from the cactus pear new starlight

I am free to arbitrate last peace

for the Comanche, the dreaming tribes

as free as a person not so good on horseback ever can be

with my stick horse trilby with the rubied eyes

her silver pink reins...

I sing all the folksongs we ever learned in grade school

like the lone prairie, and the drinking gourd

and oh it's true that I am never bored

with making bad coffee every time

to drink from a rusty tin cup and sup on

canned baked beans

and know that everything is fine

thanks to retro tv

among the Ponderosa pines

you may make fun of me

and say its a foolish thing for

a grown person to do

but you dont know how lovely it remains

to pretend I am

the horsewoman of the Plains

and tag a long happy on the wagon trains

with the scripts so refined

safe from the blizzards every time

the code of the West is mine o mine.

mary angela douglas 22 february 2023