The wild west for us <br />was never the stone walls <br />and fragments of land between them <br />the ragged, wild, bog-spawned <br />west of Ireland <br />It was a topography, a dialect, a code <br />as familiar as our parents <br />or our national tongue <br />gleaned from Television, old movies <br />dog-eared paperbacks. <br />We were born in Dublin <br />but we all, each one, <br />roamed the wild praries <br />hunting buffalo in our souls <br />spat tobaccy and smoked Marlborough <br />walked bowlegged - howdy pardner - <br />or grim and gimlet-eyed, we eyed the <br />scorching sun <br />talking in monosyllabic knowing exchanges <br />about drought, and cattle dying, and crops failing <br />thwarted in our childish hearts by <br />near incessant rain <br />and insolent verdant green.<br /><br />Geraldine Moorkens Byrne<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/irish-cowboys/
