New Classic Poems – Contemporary Verse That Rhymes

New Classic Poems
People and Places
An Easterner Looks West
Neil Harding McAlister
The West is more than just a place.
It was a time, a frame of mind
In black and white; a state of grace
Where good and bad were well defined.
The spunky gals, the stalwart sons,
The Westerns on the silver screen,
The psychopaths who toted guns –
All icons of what once had been.
Vague legends of some bad guy’s crimes
Become an epic, moral tale
Of conflict back in simpler times,
Compared to which our lives look pale.
This theatre of the Old West
Speaks of a mythic day gone by
When heroes faced life’s toughest test
With steady nerve and steely eye.
The wild, wild West was soon constrained
By fences, laws and railroad lines
‘Til little of that world remained –
But for the past, the heart still pines.
In city canyons made of steel,
Our complex days are rushed and stressed.
We yearn for things more plain and real,
And dream of vistas ‘way out west
Where spires of red rock touch the sky,
Instead of towers of sterile glass;
Where open range beguiles the eye,
Not urban wastes where taxis pass.
And so we don blue jeans and boots,
And with our little ones in tow
Vamoose by lesser-traveled routes
To see some county rodeo.
And no one even thinks it’s strange
To emulate as best we can
The cowpokes who still work the range,
As if the clothes could make the man.
It seems we need our cowboy tales;
So we their image still embrace
While speeding down our asphalt trails.
The West is more than just a place.
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