Ranch Life – Page 10 – Neil Meili

Neil Meili

Zen Cowboy Poet & Freelance Philosopher

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Category: Ranch Life

Old Ranch Physics

Audio Recordings, Farm, Nostalgia, Ranch Life / tagged Childhood, Play, Science / August 4, 2024 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Centrifugal force
is a gopher circling
on a binder twine noose

A cinch breaking
on a quarter-horse turning
and how far from the horse you fall

A quarter spinning
in the big bread-mixing bowl
and the up and down whoosh of the whine

The Cellar

Audio Recordings, Family, Farm, Ranch Life / tagged Basement, memories / August 3, 2024 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Rough as a cave
floor of hard-packed dirt
and eastern wall at a wicked slant
where the forming gave as cement was poured

Root cellar and walls of jars
The sisters remember lizards
not being afraid of lizards I don’t

Giant rumbling one-vent furnace
that sent our survival heat straight up
to find its way through leaky house any way it could

Children on a ranch can find anywhere to play
- Not there

Memories of Three or Four

Audio Recordings, Family, Farm, Ranch Life / August 2, 2024 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

I remember being nestled ='
in that old ranch kitchen
deep in the warmth of washday Monday

The Maytag's liquid sounds mixing
with the gentle driving chugs
of the little gas engine

Sloshing and chugging sloshing and chugging
as I curled up beside it
in the great pile of laundry
rich with the smells of the people I loved

Half asleep half awake I floated there
all my senses safely cradled and warmed
and part of a rhythm and a sound
like a heartbeat in a womb

1 Reply

The Girls Had an Edge

Audio Recordings, Family, Ranch Life / tagged Communication, Connection / July 20, 2024 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Me and my brothers
had tractors and trucks and such
you can't talk to tractors and trucks

Sisters with in strollers
had friends always happy
to see the world through their eyes

Lifebuoy

Audio Recordings, Family, Ranch Life / tagged Childhood / July 18, 2024 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

I have never learned to swear very well
which just goes to show that training will tell

That there is much to be said for good homes
and payoffs for stern discipline and hope

It's not that I don't know the words
but they all still taste like soap

Little Church

Audio Recordings, Family, Ranch Life, Remembering / tagged Humor, Religion / July 17, 2024 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Sometimes, as far from everywhere as we were,
a visiting or student minister would make the long trek and our one room school would become a church for the day

It didn't happen often
so the first time my three year old brother sitting in the second row heard him say
"Jesus Christ"
he turned and said
"He swore Mom, the minister swore"
"Shh" said my mother
"He swore, he swore, he swore" said Wally
every effort to silence him only increasing his insistence and volume

Most fun that most of us, except my mother, ever had in church

Home Made Ice Cream

Audio Recordings, Family, Farm, Nostalgia, Ranch Life / tagged Hope, Rain, Weather / July 16, 2024 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

When I was five we lived on a ranch
still forty miles and five years
away from electric power

We only got to eat ice cream
when the hail lay deep enough on the ground
to be scooped up in the old hand mixer

Many a hot evening in August and July
five of us sat on those hard ranch steps
looking out at the Western sky

Watching the black clouds and the grey
building and rolling our way

Silently praying our Protestant Hail Marys
four for and Dad against

Barn Swallows

Audio Recordings, Farm, Flight, Ranch Life / tagged Birds / July 6, 2024 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

They swoop
from beneath the eaves
carving an invitation
to the big red ship
Come slip your moorings
and follow us across the sea

To A Grandfather Not Met

Audio Recordings, Family, Farm, Nostalgia, Ranch Life / tagged Horses / July 5, 2024 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Dear Bill

Reading memoirs of your daughter my mother

Stories of how you broke a boxcar of broncs
and sent them on trained and tame

How at every school event
you would be the emcee

Would’ve loved being
there with you
and you living long enough
to be here with me

Hanging on the rail
while I ducked hooves
in the horse corral
and in the audience
of a poetry reading
joining in with the applause

Author’s grandfather with Baby (Uncle Bruce) on Silver. Author’s mother standing alongside – circa 1926

Ball Lightning

Audio Recordings, Family, Farm, Ranch Life / tagged Regrets / June 27, 2024 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

In the front door out the back

A ball of lightning through the barn
in the story Dad would tell

I wonder now if the light was white
and if it made a sizzling sound
as some who've seen one have described

All happened in a blink I guess, and gone
like this, and all the questions I didn't ask

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Thanks Pamela, Love to see some of your haiku and you and Pamela in the new year. All blessings, Neil…
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Another terse verse way to capture the way I feel about living under a blue tin roof for almost 30…
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