10 Best Famous Cowboys Poems

Here is a collection of the top 10 all-time best famous Cowboys poems. This is a select list of the best famous Cowboys poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Cowboys poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of cowboys poems.

• All Famous Cowboys Poems

 MOVING-PICTURE ACTRESS

(On hearing she was leaving the moving-pictures for the stage.)


Mary Pickford, doll divine,
Year by year, and every day
At the movmg-picture play,
You have been my valentine.

Once a free-limbed page in hose,
Baby-Rosalind in flower,
Cloakless, shrinking, in that hour
How our reverent passion rose,
How our fine desire you won.
Kitchen-wench another day,
Shapeless, wooden every way.
Next, a fairy from the sun.

Once you walked a grown-up strand
Fish-wife siren, full of lure,
Snaring with devices sure
Lads who murdered on the sand.
But on most days just a child
Dimpled as no grown-folk are,
Cold of kiss as some north star,
Violet from the valleys wild.
Snared as innocence must be,
Fleeing, prisoned, chained, half-dead—
At the end of tortures dread
Roaring Cowboys set you free.

Fly, O song, to her to-day, 
Like a cowboy cross the land. 
Snatch her from Belasco's hand 
And that prison called Broadway. 

All the village swains await
One dear lily-girl demure,
Saucy, dancing, cold and pure, 
Elf who must return in state.

(_Written for Mother_)


  Oh Lord. I've never lived where churches grow.
    I love creation better as it stood
  That day You finished it so long ago
    And looked upon Your work and called it good.
  I know that others find You in the light
    That's sifted down through tinted window panes,
  And yet I seem to feel You near tonight
    In this dim, quiet starlight on the plains.

  I thank You, Lord, that I am placed so well,
    That You have made my freedom so complete;
  That I'm no slave of whistle, clock or bell,
    Nor weak-eyed prisoner of wall and street.
  Just let me live my life as I've begun
    And give me work that's open to the sky;
  Make me a pardner of the wind and sun,
    And I won't ask a life that's soft or high.

  Let me be easy on the man that's down;
    Let me be square and generous with all.
  I'm careless sometimes, Lord, when I'm in town,
    But never let 'em say I'm mean or small!
  Make me as big and open as the plains,
    As honest as the hawse between my knees,
  Clean as the wind that blows behind the rains,
    Free as the hawk that circles down the breeze!

  Forgive me, Lord, if sometimes I forget.
    You know about the reasons that are hid.
  You understand the things that gall and fret;
    You know me better than my mother did.
  Just keep an eye on all that's done and said
    And right me, sometimes, when I turn aside,
  And guide me on the long, dim trail ahead
    That stretches upward toward the Great Divide.

 BOY heart of Johnny Jones—aching to-day?
Aching, and Buffalo Bill in town?
Buffalo Bill and ponies, cowboys, Indians?

Some of us know
All about it, Johnny Jones.

Buffalo Bill is a slanting look of the eyes,
 A slanting look under a hat on a horse.
He sits on a horse and a passing look is fixed
 On Johnny Jones, you and me, barelegged,
A slanting, passing, careless look under a hat on a horse.

Go clickety-clack, O pony hoofs along the street.
Come on and slant your eyes again, O Buffalo Bill.
Give us again the ache of our boy hearts.
Fill us again with the red love of prairies, dark nights, lonely wagons, and the crack-crack of rifles sputtering flashes into an ambush.