A celebration of Cowboy Poetry

By CHERYL JENSEN

The Progress

National Cowboy Poetry month was celebrated at the Mesquite Library on Tuesday, April 11 with local cowboy poets: Jim Parsons, Kathy Smith, Russ Westwood, Derek Hafen and Robin Arnold with his guitar. Some of the cowboy poems were originals. They told true stories of escape from a bear, or made the audience laugh to hear the cowboy who traveled to Hawaii…or just to Elko.

Westwood had the audience laughing with a poem about “plant rights” as he made his salad.
Arnold with his baritone voice had the audience join him singing, “Itsy Bitsy Spider” to the tune of “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” In between verses we heard the cowboys whistling and herding the cattle as they yelled “Yip-pe ti a! Yip pe-ti o!”

Jim Parsons started out the evening with several snow stories. The snow was so deep it was chest high when the cowboy and his horse were lost in a snowstorm. The horse slipped on the edge of the steep trail and they rolled down the hill. He thought no one would be able to come to his rescue but out of the snow and fog he saw a rider making a path. The cowboy got back on his horse and following the path found a cave with a fire light. He looked all around for the man who made the tracks and fire. In the morning he was able to rejoin his crew and asked them if they had made the trail. The boss of the herd said it was the ghost of Sandy, his partner of long ago – so when a silent rider appears and fades into the sky you know “someone lit that fire!”

Kathy Smith, from Ivins, writes a lot of her own poetry. She shared a story of an Apache attack on a ranch while the husband was away on a cattle trip. The wife and her hired hand got ready with their rifles. When the fight was over, she sent the hired hand to town with a note for her husband, “Send some more buckshot, I just about ran out!”

Westwood re-created an embellished on the poetry of S. Homer Barker. The cowboy was after that bear that killed his pig. He found him in a cave and, striking a match, saw two red eyes in the glow. Just then he heard a maiden’s voice outside. Wanting to dazzle the damsel, he reached for the tail! Moral of the story was “never reach for the tail – you never got hardly any!”

A ride to Elko was told by Derek Hafen. The cowboy with the steel gray eyes and fearless through and through was taught how to dance and how to kiss a mule. The audience had fun when they were asked to say a line at the end of each stanza – “Because they wanted to!”

Robin Arnold; a snowbird from West Haven, Utah; sang and played his guitar while the audience tapped their toes to the music of “that long, lonely Navajo Trail.”

Another ballad had the audience laughing about an old cowboy who finally sold his herd, wanted to settle down and get married. The ballad told the story of the wedding night when she took out her teeth, hearing aid, one leg and placed them in the chair by the bed. The old cowboy then slept in the chair because there was more of her there – so they “Slept side by Side!”

Arnold sang “The Red Hills of Utah” singing about the land of his dreams where eagles fly, “the red hills are calling to me!”

Arnold closed the program with the story of the buckaroo from paradise, Mesquite, who went to Hawaii to the beach to attract the attention of some bikini clad girls! Did he ever attract their attention!