Henry Herbert Knibbs Poems

My pony knickers at the corral bars,
The fog drifts landward from the evening sea:
The trail we rode is dim beneath the stars...
...

Twenty abreast down the golden street, ten thousand riders marched;
Bow-legged boys in their swinging chaps, all clumsily keeping time;
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A song of the range, an old-time song,
To the patter of pony's feet,
That he used to sing as we rode along,
In the hush of the noonday heat;
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Once I heard a Hobo, singing by the tie-trail,
Squatting by the red rail rusty with the dew:
Singing of the firelight, singing of the high-trail
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The rabbit's ears are flattened and he's squattin' scared and still,
Ag'inst the dripping cedar; and the quail below the hill
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Did you ever wait for daylight
when the stars along the river
Floated thick and white as snowflakes
in the water deep and strange,
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Only a few of us understood his ways and his outfit queer,
His saddle horse and his pack-horse, as lean as a winter steer,
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On the silver edge of a vacant star near the trembling Pleiades,
A Hobo, lately arrived from earth sat rubbing his rusty chin,
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The scattering sage stands thin and tense
As though afraid of the barbed-wire fence;
A windmill purrs in the lazy breeze
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My dam was a mustang white and proud,
My sire was as black as a thunder cloud;
I was foaled on the mesas cold and high,
...