Dressed like a dime store cowboy,
smiling there, in your hat and boots,
Trying to convince me to sell out; you and my banker, you’re in
cahoots.
Our little place is about all that’s
left; except for the biggest ranching outfits.
Now you sit like red headed vultures, waiting to sell our home ranch
into bits.
You say, “I’ve rented you pasture,
you’ve fenced it and paid the rent.
Tell you what, I’ll sell this place and only charge you six
percent.”
“I’ll list it at three hundred. Here,
let’s do the simple math.
Look, with your share, you can choose a new career path.”
“You can do something else. Improve
your position in life.
Forget the livestock business, avoid this trouble and strife.”
You just go on and on and on. I’m
plumb mad to my core.
I don’t suppose you can tell, but I’m mad as never before.
I could tell you plenty! But you stand
where Pop died.
Where Pop crutched his last ewe, where I sat so often and cried.
About my working up north, driving
home each weekend.
Each day of the week longing for the time that we’d spend.
Of Pop and I sharing dreams, to slowly
improve and expand,
Adding more cows, more ewes, father and son working the land.
But that’s all in the past now, and
you’ll never comprehend,
How my heart aches and aches knowing that this is the end.
The ewes are gone now; I sold them
with an ad.
Soon the cows and calves go. Damn! I feel so bad.
Over 40 years of breeding, over 40
years of pride,
Up the chute and gone, in just one fateful ride.
Yes, I could tell you plenty, but I’ll
just stand here and stew.
Yes, I could tell you plenty, but what good would it do?
You’ve been our neighbor for just
about twenty years.
While subdividing the county; you and your greedy peers.
You’ve moved in city folks on every
acre you could find.
Yes, you’ve been a neighbor, but of the absolute worst kind.
You’ve ruined this good country! Now
you’re telling me to sell!
Well, you and the banker, you can go straight to hell!
© 1989, Tom Nichols
This poem may not be reprinted or reposted
without the author's written permission.
Tom comments:
I wrote this
poem in the summer of ’89. My
father had passed away the
previous year and my mother said,
“That’s it, we’re not doing this
ranching thing anymore.” I was
having none of it, and begged her
to let me custom graze a couple
truck loads of ewes and a truck
load of gain lambs on the place
that summer. A number of family
“friends” cornered me that summer
and told me how much better off
I’d be if I’d forget about
ranching and start a new career.
One of my true friends could see
the grief I was going through and
encouraged me to write as a form
of therapy. Baxter Black’s column
in
The Livestock Weekly was my
inspiration for writing poetry.
I also worked my way through my
folks' bookshelf that summer, mostly concentrating on Western
writers such as Hyde, Doig, Van
Cleave, Moody, Steinbeck and
Borland. Sam Shepard’s The Curse
of the Starving Class,
Ralph Beer’s The Blind Corral
and William Kittredge’s Owning it All
did little to improve my mental state. Still in my twenties, I
could understand the drinking parts, but never understood how
you could give up the struggle and sell out.
