Meet Debbie's Brother…Cowboy Poet Mike Logan

Every family has its unique talents and abilities. A love of words seems to run in my family. My mother wrote narrative verse, I write stories, my son writes songs, and one of my brothers writes amazing poetry.

Meet my brother…Mike Logan, cowboy poet extraordinaire and resident of Helena, Montana. A few years ago, Mike was Montana’s Poet Laureate, and in 2006 he was named the AWA’s Cowboy Poet of the Year.

This last November, Mike was asked by the Montana Historical Society to write a poem commemorating the Capitol Christmas Tree destined to grace our nation’s capitol. The tree was cut in the Sapphire Range in the Bitterroot National Forest in Western Montana. As the tree traveled across the county, Mike’s poem went with it.

With Mike’s permission, I’d like to share that poem with you now.

MONTANA TREASURE
by Mike Logan
(copyright 2008)

Way up in the misting Sapphires
There grew a wondrous tree.
A hundred years it stood there
In a range high, wild and free.

Tall and straight as an arrow
It pierced high country skies,
Gained symmetry and beauty
And grace and shape and size.

As though through mountain magic,
Some forest wizardry,
All things beneath and around it
Came to be a part of that tree.

Its limbs felt the prowl of the cougar,
Heard the bugle of a phantom bull,
Watched the waddle of a porcupine,
And a moon that was almost full.

It knew the white hot lightning
And thunder of a long gone storm,
The velvet touch of the sunrise
When the air was sweet and warm.

Enduring the fury of the blizzard,
It bowed ‘neath the weight of the snow,
Looked down on the track of the mule deer
As the gray wolf passed below.

It fed and sheltered the pine squirrel,
Saw the blue grouse mating dance,
And the ambling gait of the grizzly
As he grazed on the new-green plants.

The ghostly hoot of the owl at night
The haunting yodel of the loon,
The howl of the lonesome coyote
Gave voice to its mystic rune.

All these gifts together
Formed the soul of this shining tree
A glowing Sapphired jewel
For all the world to see.

This Christmas all Montanans,
In honor of The Christ Child’s Birth,
Send, along with this mountain treasure,
Our wish for “PEACE ON EARTH.”