Catherine Devine | + Follow Poet |
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In the Long Ago & Used To Be

What do you see when you look at his face
Weather beaten & etched by hard work’s steady pace?
You see a broken down drunken old fool
I see a vaquero, a cowboy old school
These cattle, those horses, this land are his life
They helped him provide for his children & wife

The Vail brothers, Escalantes, Leons, Acosta, Andrada
From the X-9 to Del Lago, Rincon Creek to La Posta Quemada
Lopez, Etheridge, De La Ossa & Daly, all hard working men
Holding strong to the traditions of a life from way back when
From the base of the Rincons, their cattle once freely roamed
These Cowboys are the lifeblood of this valley we call home

I looked up to these men & others like them when I was a youth
They taught me to work hard, stand tall & always speak the truth
They rail at the developers who never seem to keep their word
Praying that they’ll still have enough ground to run their herds
They watch as suburbia comes flooding into a valley once pristine
As ticky tacky houses turn good grazing lands into an urban scene

The word out on the city streets is that the cowboy way is gone
But as long as there are horses then the Cowboy will ride on
Somewhere up in New River, a cowboy still rides out tonight
To gaze out over a moonlit range, far from the city’s blight
In Cascabel, an Old Vaquero & his grandchild working the pen
Are doing their part to see that the cowboy way never ends

What do you see when you look in his face?
Weather beaten & etched by hard work’s steady pace?
You see a tattered old man, shaky hands & blurry gaze
I see the heroes of my youth, hear the tales of the glory days
When cattle outnumbered people & Cowboys still roamed free
Back when the West was Wild, back in the long ago & used to be

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