Ron Wallace

Ron Wallace Poems

Ron Wallace Biography

Ron Wallace is a Native son of Oklahoma and a national poetry award winner. He is the author of four volumes of poetry published by TJMF Publishing of Clarksville, Indiana. All four have received critical acclaim and met with success in the poetry world. His first book, Native Son, was a finalist in the 2007 Oklahoma Book Awards. I Come from Cowboys … and Indians won the 2009 Oklahoma Writer’s Federation “Best Book of Poetry Award” and Oklahoma Cantos was again a finalist in the 2011 Oklahoma Book Awards, a finalist in the Western Heritage Book Awards and won the 2011 Oklahoma Writer’s Federation “Best Book of Poetry Award”. Wallace’s Choctaw, Cherokee, Osage heritage is intertwined with his Scots-Irish roots and often reflected in his writing. He lists James Dickey, Robinson Jeffers, Yusef Komunyakaa and his former Southeastern Oklahoma State University professor and poet, Howard Starks as his major influences. A former public school teacher and coach he has been a featured poet at The Abydos Learning Project in Texas three times, a featured poet at the Woody Guthrie Festival in Okemah, Oklahoma for the last four years. He has been a reader at the Tennessee Humanities Festival, a member of the Emerging Poets Southern Tour. His work has won several individual state and national awards and has been published in many journals and anthologies. Critiques, reviews of his work and more personal biography can be found at www.RonWallacePoetry.com)

The Best Poem Of Ron Wallace

War Horses

Bukowski is inside-reading;
I leave him at my desk to wait
the dead of winter with whiskey and cigars,
and walk outside onto the cedar deck.
I carry leather, stone, steel and oak with me
into the elements
Dickey, Jeffers, Komunyakaa
and Howard Starks;
these are my war horses.
They bleed Whitman,
sometimes in fine arterial spray,
sometimes in droplets that spatter
in bright red splotches
and sometimes –
sometimes they seep, saturating the pages.
They speak of horses, hawks, yellow jackets
and mountain boomers,
Osage County, Buckhead and Bogalusa
and I listen for echoes in trees and rain
beyond the empty clink of beer bottles
where unfolding black steals the sunset,
and I lift worn western heels up
onto a low wrought iron table
to watch a changing sky
before reading the blood.

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