Audio Recordings – Page 146 – Neil Meili

Neil Meili

Zen Cowboy Poet & Freelance Philosopher

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Category: Audio Recordings

Ball Lightning

Audio Recordings, Family, Nature / tagged Regret / July 22, 2022 / 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 that I didn't ask

Pulling Pipe

Audio Recordings, Cattle, Cows, Family, Farm, Poems about Poetry, Ranch Life / July 21, 2022 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Trouble down the well
and me, my dad and my brothers
are Texas roughnecks
pulling, spinning and stacking pipe
pipe and rod and "Careful dammit!
If you drop that rod the well is shot"

We're Red Adair, fighting a fire
we're wet and muddy and cold and mad
and we've got to get it done by dark

The gold down there's not black but red
an iron rich sea hiding away
fro the pulling power of the prairie sun

Looking back fifty years from a poet's perch
I pull, spin and stack
metaphor and meaning
Back then it was just men
doing what they had to do
and white-faced cattle waiting

Father Fighting the Prairie Fire

Audio Recordings, Family, Farm, Ranch Life / July 20, 2022 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

All week
he came home while we slept
and left before we woke
leaving trails of courage and smoke

He's been gone a long time this time

Our early books
had pictures and stories
of a peaceful heaven and a red hot hell

Though none of the men on the fire-line
between the two to keep the children safe

Over Their Shoulders

Audio Recordings, Family, Ranch Life / tagged Expectations, Fear, Hope / July 19, 2022 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

He came of age in the twenties
Bumper crops and a big new house

She came of age in the thirties
Dust and alkali in you pie and eye

When things started looking good he'd buy a big new shiny car

Those times are coming back

When things started looking good she'd can a bunch more fruit
Those times might be coming back

Farm Dog

Audio Recordings, Family, Ranch Life / tagged Death, Dogs, Love, Loyalty / July 17, 2022 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

1 Reply

One for the Aunties

Audio Recordings, Family / tagged Pioneers / July 16, 2022 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Who midwifed my father into the world in a packing crate shack in 1912
And washed up and went home
without mentioning the blessed event to the government (and no one else did either)
Forty years later
he applies for a passport and finds that he doesn't exist
Until they swear on their memory
and bring him into the world again

The Austrian Uncles

Audio Recordings, Family, Ranch Life, Remembering / July 15, 2022 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Already old when I was young
revered as I would hope to be when old
Two brothers married to two sisters of my father's father
Great aunts
always as they've always been
busily bustling 'round the house

While the uncles somehow stay
both present and out of the way

Little china cups in work-hard hands
black coffee and home brew
sipping the day away

They Had Some Cows

Audio Recordings, Cattle, Cows, Family, Farm, Travel / July 14, 2022 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

The Cherhill Chalk Horse

Grandpa and Hilda and the Snake

Audio Recordings, Family, Relationships, Travel / tagged Fate / July 13, 2022 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

In Brazil our grandfather at about twelve
quick precise and fresh from Switzerland
leaps up and kills a venomous snake
just as it is set to strike a four year old girl
In awe and gratitude she says
I'm going to marry you when I grow up
He moves to far-away Canada
marries, has seven children, wife dies young
raises children, sells the farm, retires to Brazil
She was still there - you can guess the rest

1 Reply

Grandma Brander

Audio Recordings, Family, Relationships, Remembering / tagged Childhood, Games / July 12, 2022 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Mother would sometimes stop our play and send us to visit her mother in that little white house
She may have had grand stories to tell, about her childhood in England and Ontario and her brother lost at sea, and our grandfather whom we'd never met
What was he like - Were we like him - Would we want to be
It was a leap we never took, and spent afternoons in leaps more comfortable to us all - small coloured marbles over small coloured marbles in the inscrutability of Chinese Checkers

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Anonymous on Rule BritannicaNovember 6, 2026
Amen to that.
Sandi Hebley on Ready for WinterOctober 26, 2026
😁😁
NEIL MEILI on Laughing With the DeadOctober 25, 2026
Thanks for the story Sandi, And bet he is and that I would have liked him Neil
Sandi Hebley on Okay Now – MostlyOctober 22, 2026
🤗
Sandi Hebley on Laughing With the DeadOctober 21, 2026
One of my fondest memories is that the last full sentence my dad spoke was to tell a visitor a…

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