On Those Who Poetry Belongs To by Natalie G’Schwind
By Jewell Rodgers
My name is Jewel Rogers and I am your state poet of Nebraska. Today we are introducing some poetry from Natalie G’Schwind whom I met in Broken Bow, Nebraska during a Homegrown event. Anyway, Natalie was one of the readers at Homegrown – a series of intimate readings and art shares across the great state of Nebraska held in partnership with the Academy of American Poets.
Natalie grew up in the canyons around Callaway, Nebraska. She makes her living managing Nebraska’s sandhills and grasslands and helps out at the family ranch every chance she gets. She has two books Bays and Prairies and Ways of Bays. She had the honor to contribute poems to Sally Harper Bates’s Facing West: Voices of Western Women Volume II and Betty Lynne McCarthy’s REAL, which received the EQUUS AWARD and the Will Rogers Medallion Award. In 2024 she received the Della Johns Scholarship to attend and present at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, and was asked back for the 2026 gathering.
This is her poem.
Those Who Poetry Belongs To
Why is poetry for overcrowded classrooms,
Squeaky chairs, bored stares.
How can that be when all I see on the ranch is
Poetry.
How can the words be painted on my paper
When lectures stain every inch of my notebook?
My mind is numbed. Stale as monotone
Professor's classrooms.
But on the ranch, watching a bay horse
Scooping left, snapping right.
Rider motionless as if the horse and him
Is one dancing creature. Cattle sorting
Like they know the rider’s mind.
Ropes float
As if God hung them on the breeze
Come to rest on a calf.
Cowhands roll twine. Effortless.
Ropes turn in the air, tune wind.
Poetry sounds like rope’s song.
How can poetry belong
To empty echos in marble libraries,
Weary eyed student trying
To be the first poet to get rich.
I have seen more cowboys
Constructed in poetry
Than any scholar of the art itself.
Great poets, old sunburned cowboys.
Their life is one continuous poem,
Engraved in the lines of their flesh.
Hands tell of dallies missed and wire sliced.
Painted always next to his horse,
A creature whom God wrote his favorite poem on.
Rhymes and rhythms pulse up from the horse’s stride.
These men wield no pen,
Only skills of their own ancient art
As they let the rope dance off of their fingertips.
That is when words pile into my mind.
Let me become poetry.
Climb into the sun baked saddle
Feel horse’s breath.
Listen to the swoosh of rope cutting
Silent colors of sunrise
Whispering to me my next poem.
Out where wind writes
Her song into my face,
Winter left her mark on my lips.
Used with Permission.
To me, what stands out in this poem is how it challenges where poetry “belongs.” It starts with the classroom—the squeaky chairs, the marble libraries, the monotone lectures—and sets that against the wide-open space of the ranch. The contrast is sharp: one feels numb and lifeless, the other alive with rhythm, movement, and song.
I love how the poem shows poetry in action, not just on paper: the bay horse scooping left and right, the rider moving as one with the animal, the rope floating as if suspended by God. Those moments create a music of their own, what Natalie calls “rope song.” It’s a reminder that poetry isn’t just words—it’s also gesture, craft, tradition, and labor.
The poem also honors cowboys as poets, even if they never write. Their skin, their hands, their connection to the horse all read as verses. The horse itself becomes a poem written by God. That’s such a beautiful way of expanding what counts as poetry—making it less about marble halls and more about lived life.
By the end, the poem shifts inward: Natalie taking inspiration directly from the land, or continues, anyway. The sunbaked saddle, the breath of the horse, the rope’s swish, the colors of sunrise—these are all the details that spark language. It’s almost as if nature dictates the next poem, and the poet’s task is just to listen.
What lingers is the sense that poetry is everywhere—engraved in bodies, landscapes, and the small rituals of survival. The classroom may try to contain it, but out on the ranch, poetry is already alive.
POETS ON THE PLAINS HOST
Jewel Rodgers is the 2025–2029 Nebraska State Poet, a 2025 Academy of American Poets Fellowship recipient, and a 2025 AIRIES Fellow. A three-time Omaha Entertainment and Arts Award nominee for Best Performance Poet and a three-time TEDx speaker, she is a nationally touring interdisciplinary performer and spatial practitioner. Jewel merges art, storytelling, and placemaking to inspire and connect audiences across the U.S. and beyond. https://www.jewelrodgers.com/ (Bloom)
FEATURED POET
NATALIE G’SCHWIND grew up in the canyons around Callaway, Nebraska. She makes her living managing Nebraska’s sandhills grasslands and helps out at the family ranch every chance she gets. She has two books Bays and Prairies and Ways of Bays. She had the honor to contribute poems to Sally Harper Bates’s Facing West: Voices of Western Women Volume II and Betty Lynne McCarthy’s REAL, which received the EQUUS AWARD and the Will Rogers Medallion Award. In 2024 she received the Della Johns Scholarship to attend and present at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada and was asked back for the 2026 gathering.
