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The bar-keep ducks no more from flying lead,
his bottles, backed by mirrors, stand intact;
no saga of the Western past unfolds
its fiction charged with one per cent of fact.

The sixty-chambered? six-guns cool their steel,
with tomahawks and Winchesters galore;
no cowboy winces when a knife probes deep,
no outlaw barges through a bat-wing door.

No aged chief speaks wisdom to his tribe,
the sheriff’s posse now has left the trail;
no half-breed drags his victim through the dust,
in town no rustler tries a break from jail.

The stampede and the stage-coach running wild –
attuned to equal frenzy in the score,
have thundered their last race – upon TV,
the Sioux braves and Apaches charge no more.

Prospectors, gamblers, show-girls in saloons,
granitic rancher and compliant squaw;
have made their exit – peaceful lies the range
where Blackfeet and Commanches keep the law.

A programme change – no weekly ‘Western’ now –
for addicts, young and not so young, a must,
whose loss will make the ‘telly’ incomplete,
’til further redskins ride and ‘bite the dust’.

T. C. Hudson

© T. C. Hudson.

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