Out West (Poetry)

They came here to carve out a better life —
settlers with their wagons full of dreams —
dirt farmers and their preacher, plus his wife,
all fired up with belief and hokey schemes.

They built log cabins, fenced the lawless land
thinking they could tame it to their will.
The climate punished, few things went as planned —
the crops were poor, the preacher’s wife took ill.

The pioneering spirit that had burned
so stubbornly then guttered into doubt —
saw every small ambition roughly spurned,
and future struggles — ruin — all sketched out...

Some die-hards stayed. The preacher saw his wife
buried in a lonesome prairie grave;
earth cut to fit her; every wind-honed knife
keening over her God didn’t save.

Abandoning their homesteads to the rain,
fence posts rotting, hay bales black with mould,
most left — went grimly back the way they came,
wiser now, dejected, tired and old.

The West is full of ghost towns built by men
who worked the land and claimed it as their own.
They stayed a while, then had to think again —
there’s places in this world best left alone.