An Afternoon with Irish Cows
My grandpa used to call me
cow eyes
a farmer's compliment.
I'd act insulted
and he'd laugh
but we both liked it
felt the spirit of it
the beauty
the truth.
Since then
others
hearing this nickname
have laughed
city people
who know nothing of cows
their gentle nature
their groundedness,
city people
nurtured by the mother's milk of cows
yet ungrateful for it,
taking it for granted,
clueless.
Cows are lovely,
slow to alarm,
quick to forgive,
wearing their heart in their eyes,
harming no one.
People who have never peered
into that deep dark wetness
experienced that soft accepting attentiveness
their patience,
their invitation,
they don't know what they're missing.
Cow eyes
soulful and all knowing
big and beautiful and brown and trusting
ancient and wise.
What a sweet nickname.
Thanks Grandpa.
-Billy Collins
The Bat
By day the bat is cousin to the mouse.
He likes the attic of an aging house.
His fingers make a hat about his head.
His pulse beat is so slow we think him dead.
He loops in crazy figures half the night
Among the trees that face the corner light.
But when he brushes up against a screen,
We are afraid of what our eyes have seen:
For something is amiss or out of place
When mice with wings can wear a human face.
~Theodore Roethke
I Knew A Woman
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I'd have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek.)
How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin:
I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing did we make.)
Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved.)
Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I'm martyr to a motion not my own;
What's freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways.)
-Theodore Roethke
Garbage Truck
Once I had two strong young men hanging off my butt
and a distinctive stink that announced
when I was inching down your street
at the regal, elephantine pace
that let my men step down from me running
to heave your garbage into my gut
then fling the clanging metal cans
to tumble and rumble, crash and leap
back to sort-of-where you'd lugged them to the curb
before another oblivious night of sleep.
Did you think life was tough?
I reveled in it, all the stuff
you threw out, used up, let rot,
the pretty packaging, the scum, the snot,
vomit and filth, everything you thought
useless, dangerous, or repugnant:
I ate it for breakfast. I hauled it
out of sight. And what did I get?
You were annoyed by my noise.
You coughed at my exhaust.
Your kids stopped playing in the street
to pinch their noses and gag theatrically
with no clue how sick they'd be without me.
I was the lowest of the low, an untouchable,
yet I did what I did and did it well.
Now I am not laughable: a "waste management vehicle"
denatured robotic sanitized presentable.
My strong young men are gone. I have no smell.
I'm painted deep green to look organic and clean.
Your "residential trash carts" are matching green
injection-molded high-density polyethylene
that barely thuds when I lower them to the ground
after I've stabbed and lifted and upended them
with twin prongs that retract into my side
so not to scratch anything or scare anyone.
Who can complain? Right there on your street
I mash and compact and obliterate your waste.
You need never give it a second thought.
It's safe it's easy nobody gets dirty.
It's how you want your life to be.
But life's not garbage. Garbage is life.
Look what you've got. Look what you throw out.
~Michael Ryan
- Joined
- 14 Mar 04
- Moves
- 186458
Originally posted by Grampy BobbyThis thread appears to have become a monopoly.
[b]In the desert
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter -- bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."
Stephen Crane[/b]
Originally posted by Great Big SteesA Minor Bird
Certainly not. It was only an observance. Don't we have freedom of speech?
I have wished a bird would fly away,
And not sing by my house all day;
Have clapped my hands at him from the door
When it seemed as if I could bear no more.
The fault must partly have been in me.
The bird was not to blame for his key.
And of course there must be something wrong
In wanting to silence any song.
Robert Frost
When You Are Old
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
William Butler Yeats
Originally posted by Great Big SteesPoetry
Certainly not. It was only an observance. Don't we have freedom of speech?
Call it a field where the animals
who were forgotten by the Ark
come to graze under the evening clouds.
Or a cistern where the rain that fell
before history trickles over a concrete lip.
However you see it,
this is no place to set up
the three-legged easel of realism
or make the reader climb
over the many fences of a plot.
Let the portly novelist
with his noisy typewriter
describe the city where Francine was born,
how Albert read the paper on the train,
how curtains were blowing in the bedroom.
Let the playwright with her torn cardigan
and a dog curled on the rug
move the characters
from the wings to the stage
to face the many-eyed darkness of the house.
Poetry is no place for that.
We have enough to do
complaining about the price of tobacco,
passing the dripping ladle,
and singing songs to a bird in a cage.
We are busy doing nothing -
and all we need for that is an afternoon,
a rowboat under a blue sky,
and maybe a man fishing from a stone bridge,
or, better still, nobody on that bridge at all.
Billy Collins