Marleen Bussma was raised on a small farm in North Dakota where horses and cows were part
of daily life. As a young girl, herding cattle on horseback stirred her
imagination to want to be just like Dale Evans. Farm stories and intriguing
tales of the old west have had a big influence on her writing. She crafts
verses on the plight of women of the west from frontier days to modern farm and
ranch times. Marleen has won nine Art Spur Awards from cowboypoetry.com and served
as the director for the Annual Mesquite, NV Western Roundups in 2014 and 2015. She has published a
collection of her cowboy poetry entitled She Wanted To Be Like Dale and a CD is
Scrapin’ By reading her original
cowboy poems. She has been honored by
being invited to perform at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, NV
next January.
THE PHANTOM’S LURE
His four feet pound the thirsty dirt that paints the fence
posts gray.
The wind weaves fingers pulling through his mane and tail’s
display.
The phantom that he’s racing lives within his feral mind,
while teasing thoughts of freedom flicker, fade, then fall
behind.
What dredged this distant dream of open range that has no
gates
and fills his belly with the fire that sparks and motivates
his actions like a wild stallion flaunting fearlessness?
This craving for a life untamed is all he will possess.
His captive body cramped by the corral betrays his ache
to run unfettered, loose, untouched like moonlight’s glow, to
shake
the bonds that separate him from his distant past.
Equus caballus swings his restless head as if to cast
himself back through to early years when horses all ran free.
Their bands ran with the elk and bison nursed by liberty.
The endless prairie fed them while their numbers gained and
grew.
They filled the west with thunder racing towards a
rendezvous
with man and fate that shaped their world and set the modern
stage.
Does this horse know his brothers still run free through
desert sage?
The barriers and fences work to keep his dreams repressed.
Though conquered, tamed and tethered, he’s an icon of the
west.
Marleen
Bussma
Marilyn Ball tells us: "As a kid
growing up on a rather lonely ranch in the Uintah Basin, I appreciated nature
and life, and began at age fourteen putting down my thoughts in poetry.
As time went on with much effort while in college majoring in
Nursing with no electives allowed, I continued writing and won honors. I won awards for my poems with UTSPS, League of Utah Writers, Z-Arts and in the Mesquite Fine Arts contests. UTSPS and Dixie Poets have been a great help to me in publishing a book of my poems about Lake Powell called Stepping on Water and Stones." Available for $10 from mball at sunrivertoday dot com.
