2024 NaPM 27 April

[RiverNotch]

Rules: Write a poem for national poetry month on the topic or form described. Each poem should appear as a separate reply to this thread. The goal is to, at the end of the month have written 30 poems for National Poetry Month.

Describe the relationship between a cow and some other creature, such as a veterinarian or a gadfly.

[Mark A Becker]

cow on the hillside
needs help resisting the bugs
egret on the cow

egret on the cow
stands there feasting on the bugs
cow on the hillside

[dukealien]

That Duo


I wish I knew the language.
Then, maybe, I could tell
between Mama Mu the dairy cow
and Kraken her crow amanuensis
which is instigator
and which the giddy follower
in their escapades.

With real crows, of course,
there’s never any question
what they’re thinking:
they tell you every way there is
(people must have learned
half their body language
just from watching those
black birds dispute).

But as for cows...
what do they plot and dream
as their many stomachs ponder?
Do they pirouette and slide,
sled madcap, platform-dive
and bicycle, most perilous of all
udders swinging pendulously
in the rhythm of their dance?

[TranquillityBase]

My father’s dream
was to escape the city
so he bought forty acres
of a broken up ranch,
got a small herd of cows
and a bull he named Charlie.
We hauled hay, sprayed them
in summer against the swarming flies,
and he never sold one for slaughter.

His “hired hand”
a ninety year old native of the county,
carefully collected 
stray pieces of barbed wire
carefully bundling them up:
“Texas wouldn’t be nothing
if it wasn’t for barbed wire.”

Once, they found a cow
on its side, trying to birth a dead calf
had to pull the already rotting
corpse out by hand.

I was a reluctant cowboy
but grew to love the land.
My father lived his dream life for seven years
until a heart attack took him down.
The cows long gone,
the place went back to the cedar.
But at age 40, I returned
to that specific universe of my youth.
I tended it, cutting cedar,
keeping the well running
keeping the acres around the cabin
mown, replacing the outhouse
as though my father might return.

It’s going back to the cedar now:
too far to go added to an old man’s reluctance
to revisit those many worlds of his past.

[RiverNotch]

There is no fear in the old cow's eyes
as she is led to the slaughter.
There is only regret that she now comes
to meet her Maker before she's met
any of her whelps full-grown,

that she's never jumped the fence.
And just before the hammer strikes
her head, she notices the drains
stained red about her feet.
"What a waste of blood", she thinks,

while the butcher's diaper
(his company mandated dress)
begins to chafe, his overworked
ligaments begin to tear,
and his children back at home
ask for actual cheese.

[busker]

The killers of cows
will be punished after they die
by Vishnu,
the one true
god (all others being lies -
the Yahwehs and Allahs,
Zeus, Odin, Pallas
Athene, though the aesthete cries
in me, to lose the mighty Grecians).

Cows, but no dogs,
no felines, but those hogs
with minds beautiful, like Russel Crowe’s.
Beautiful, with even toes,
was Sarah the ungulate
for the Alabamans to strangulate
for Trader Joe’s.
Such sins shall be reckoned -
but most of all, the deaths of cows,
with failed harvests, broken plows,
and famines in the offing.

Those that are scoffing
at my prophecy, hark!
The gospel of Mark
says similar things -
the mountains shall be felled,
the cities be shelled,
and G-d’s plan unveiled
when Christ shall be king.

I say when it’s time,
not lions, but kine
shall wreak havoc …

[Wjames]

There are no wild cows.

When you've been pulled by the nose
since before you were born,
a predator can seem a friend.