Howdy, and come on in. Wipe your feet.

I'm Ina Ewing. My husband Ronnie and I run about three hundred mother cows in the northeast corner of Nevada, on a place his grandfather bought in 1911 with two horses, a wagon and a loan he paid off in nineteen years. I came to it as a bride in 1964, from a sheep outfit over in Humboldt County, and I have been cooking on the same spot of kitchen floor ever since. It has been three different stoves. It has been the same floor.

I started writing poems sometime in the 1980s, on the backs of feed store calendars, in the hour after supper dishes when the house was quiet, which was not often. Ronnie found one in the flour bin and read it out loud at the table, and after I got over wanting to kill him I decided he hadn't laughed in the wrong places, and I kept going.

Every January they hold the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, and have since 1985. Anybody can sign up to stand up in the open sessions and say a poem. The first time I did, my knees knocked so hard Ronnie said he heard them from the back row. I have gone back most winters since. My knees still knock. They just knock in time now.

Most cowboy poetry is written from the saddle, and that is how it should be. But somebody has to feed those cowboys, doctor them, drive the truck while they pitch hay, and hold the flashlight at two in the morning. So mine are from the cookhouse side. They rhyme, because I was raised on poems that rhymed, and I am too old to quit now.

I made this page myself on the computer we bought for the cattle records, with a book from the county library and a good deal of language. If anything on it is crooked, that is why.

The neighbors trailer in by dawn the day we brand in May,
And Ronnie says there might be twelve. There's twenty by midday.
A man who knows each heifer by the white spot on her ear
Can't tell you who is coming in to eat his dinner here.

The beans go in to soak on Thursday, Friday night the roast,
And Saturday by four o'clock I'm standing at my post,
Potato salad in the washtub, pies along the sill,
And sun tea in the pickle jars, and ice enough to fill

A stock tank, if you had to. And at noon I ring the bell,
And here they come in off the fire, and Lord, how they do smell
Of smoke and dust and scorching hair and other things besides.
They scrub up at the hydrant, and they leave their spurs outside.

Then twenty men come in my house as quiet as a prayer,
And all you hear is forks and chairs and "Pass the butter there."
They eat the roast, they eat the beans, they eat the second pie.
Bob Delk's boy eats a dozen rolls and looks me in the eye

And asks if there's dessert. There is. There's always more of that.
Then one by one they stand up, and they each pick up a hat,
And every one of twenty stops beside the kitchen door
And says, "Fine dinner, Ina," and goes back to work some more.

Now, that's not much for poetry. It wouldn't win a prize.
But I have heard it thirty years from men with smoke-red eyes,
And there's no finer thing been said in any book I know
Than twenty dusty neighbors saying so before they go.

When the clock says a quarter to two in the night
And the wind is a-howl and the window is white,
It's my turn on the heifers. I pull on my coat
Over flannel pajamas, a scarf at my throat,

And the four-buckle overshoes, Ronnie's old hat,
And the flashlight that works if you give it a pat.
And I wade to the shed and I fling the door wide.
There's the little black heifer, flat out on her side.

She's been at it too long, and she's tired, and she's young,
And the calf's coming backward. I bite down my tongue
On a word that my mother would not have approved,
And I run for the house, and for Ronnie. He moved.

I'll skip over the next part. It wasn't much fun,
But by four in the morning, the hard part was done,
And a bull calf lay limp in the straw, cold as stone,
And his mother too tired to get up on her own.

So I rubbed him with feed sacks and wrapped him up tight,
And I carried him home through the snow and the night,
Sixty pounds of wet calf, up the porch, through the door,
And I laid him down flat on my clean kitchen floor

With the oven door open, the heat turned up high,
And a hair dryer going, and Ronnie close by.
Well, he shivered at five, and he bawled about six,
And at seven he stood up and got in his licks

On the dog and the dishpan, the broom and the chair,
And I've fed worse company, sitting right there.
When the storm broke at daylight, we took him back out,
And she looked him all over and sniffed him about,

And she claimed him. I went in and mopped up my floor,
And I set the alarm for a quarter to four.

If you want poems from the saddle side, Hollis Brummett writes them out of the Texas Panhandle at Wind Side of the Barn. He's the real thing. Read the one about the horse that wouldn't load.

All the poems on this page are my own, and I would be obliged if you asked before you printed them anywhere. If you'd like one said at your church supper or your Grange, write me. I will come for a pie.