Ranch Life – Page 19 – Neil Meili

Neil Meili

Zen Cowboy Poet & Freelance Philosopher

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Category: Ranch Life

Question to Furrow the Brow

Audio Recordings, Farm, Ranch Life, Remembering / June 19, 2023 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

How can you take
the boy out of the farm
out of the boy
and why would you try

Back Again to Never Left

Audio Recordings, Nostalgia, Ranch Life, Remembering / tagged Childhood / June 18, 2023 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

A happy childhood can't be cured
- Hortense Calisher

And there we were are there
boy and dog and endless hills
and night
and home to a door never locked

Author’s boyhood home

The Albums

Audio Recordings, Family, Farm, Nostalgia, Ranch Life, Relationships, Remembering / tagged Aging, Family / June 10, 2023 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Mother's shrinkage was marked by domicile

House, apartment, retirement and nursing home
shedding at each move, furniture, china, and art
except for, and never, the old photo albums
heavy in padded leather brown and green

Each visit when conversation stuttered to a stall
(Religion all but Baptist drowned and what use is weather without crops)
out would come the albums
and in we all would dive
for pennies bright and shiny
at the bottom of the pool

Here's one from 1958
How young the queen looked then

Roses in My Rear View Mirror

Audio Recordings, Family, Farm, Nostalgia, Ranch Life, Relationships, Remembering / June 9, 2023 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

(and a few bluebonnets too)

There's a family always laughing
There are girls and they're all smiling

There's a collie dog a roaming
chasing gophers down their holes

There's a ranch with grass all greening fifteen minutes after rain

Maybe you can go home again

Spring in Moose Jaw

Audio Recordings, Farm, Ranch Life / tagged Saskatchewan / May 29, 2023 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

In the city
retired farmers still watch
the weather

In greening front yards
wooden ducks nailed to white posts

Wings spinning backwards

Survival Groups

Audio Recordings, Family, Farm, Ranch Life, Relationships / tagged Adversity, Athol Murray College of Notre Dame, Community, Pioneers, Survival, War / May 27, 2023 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Small and tight and all their might
to make sure the group survives
knowing that if it don’t they won’t

A family on a prairie farm
an army unit in a shooting war

A group of boys in a Wilcox shack
a load of coal from death by frost

No reunions like their reunions

Tabby La Rosa

Audio Recordings, Farm, Nature, Ranch Life / tagged Cats, Education, Horses, Kittens, Learning / May 15, 2023 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Horses are cats
they just want to be
petted and loved

Although
when you neglect to do so
they are much more likely
to send you flying
than piss on your best Persian mat

That sort of thing is reserved for cats
and cats are not horses
and deeply resent being ridden

as every toddling two-year-old
in history (unable to read history)
will have to have etched
on the blank slates of their skin

Good Advice

Audio Recordings, Ranch Life, Relationships / tagged Country Music, Humor, Wisdom / May 13, 2023 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Whenever anything got broke or lost
Kim's mother would say:
Don't cry over anything that can't cry over you

Which is a good thing to remember
when your life becomes a country song
and your dog and your wife and your truck are gone
Your dog will miss you right away and cry with the coyotes all the night
your wife will miss you later - maybe and cry for all the coulda's that might

buy you're sadly mistaken
if you think that old C-10 Chevy
following the repo truck down the lane
is going to miss you half as much as you miss it

Correction Lines

Audio Recordings, Personal Growth, Ranch Life, Travel / May 1, 2023 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

The sides of Saskatchewan are British straight
though closer together at the top than the bottom
With the world being round and the fields being square
something has to give, and the solution is correction lines

Which is why going north on a gravel road at eighty
you come to two ninety degree turns in short succession

Sober, or careful, or both, you might slow enough to make them

If not, since this is Saskatchewan, you will most likely end up
in a fresh plowed field or to your windshield in wheat
not Thelma and Louising over a cliff or head-on into a wall of rock

And since a poem must have a metaphor
let us count the times of grace
when non-fatal course correction
was allowed and a new road traveled with gratitude

Cowboys Will Be Boys

Audio Recordings, Cattle, Cowboy Poetry, Cows, Farm, Ranch Life, Relationships / April 30, 2023 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

How funny is it
to be kicked by a cow
(at least compared to a horse)

Depends a lot
if it happens to you
or to your tightest friend

(By tight I mean
both close and liquored up)

Just one of those jokes
that girls don’t seem to get
not even in the calving pen

At least I’ve never seen
them doing their damndest
to get the one with broken ribs
to laugh so they can see them cry

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