Cows – Neil Meili

Neil Meili

Zen Cowboy Poet & Freelance Philosopher

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Category: Cows

Buffalo Chips

Audio Recordings, Cattle, Cows, Farm, Manure, Nostalgia, Ranch Life / tagged Childhood, Play / October 3, 2022 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Lily pads floating
on the sea of prairie grass

Heat for the tepees
or the homesteader's cabin

Nothing wasted in the West

And every boy knew
that a good sharp stick or a pointy-toed shoe
would let you know
if one was just right, or still a little too new

And I'm here to tell you, that compared to a good dry chip
meeting a West wind's invitation
a Frisbee is a weak and poor, plastic imitation

Smells of the Corrals

Audio Recordings, Cattle, Cows, Farm, Manure, Ranch Life / tagged Horses / October 1, 2022 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Horses don’t smell like cows
except when your nose is full
of acrid smoke at branding time

Disinfectant
from the pail for sloshing on the bag
after their prairie oysters are shucked
and later them oysters on the open fire

Burning
from the wire-saw freeing the ingrown horn

Dung flung
and dung hung on boots and belt and butt
from the calf that beat you at ‘who throws who’

1 Reply

Motherin’ Up

Audio Recordings, Cattle, Cowboy Poetry, Cows, Family, Farm, Ranch Life, Relationships / tagged Coping, Grief / September 14, 2022 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Sometimes you lose a cow
sometimes you lose a calf
You wrap the orphan
in the dead calf's skin
and the mother takes her in
like kin
Gold enough there for a country song
It's a hurtin song - you can sing along
About true love died and true love gone
and foolin yourself just long enough
to keep on keeping on

Peace on the Prairie

Audio Recordings, Cattle, Cows, Farm, Ranch Life / September 13, 2022 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Cowboy in the City

Audio Recordings, Cattle, Cows, Nature / tagged Fear / September 12, 2022 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

A bull in his place
is a creature of grace

It is not the bull
but the fear in the bull
that endangers the china in the shop

Cowboys & Ranchers

Audio Recordings, Cattle, Cows, Farm, Ranch Life / August 12, 2022 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Cowboys may love their horses
but it's the ranchers love the cows

The cowboys know it's their job to keep them critters safe
and pay and found depends
on their not coming to bad ends

But you won't catch a cowboy
with a soft light in his eye
counting again by one and ten
every head in the holding pen

And ranchers ain't so likely
when the summer flies are high
and the herd a scattered mess
to wish them all in a warmer place
than the sun-baked August West

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

They Had Some Cows

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

The Cherhill Chalk Horse

Losses

Audio Recordings, Cattle, Cows, Family, Farm, Ranch Life, Relationships / tagged Death, War / February 27, 2022 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Empty as a mouth full of snow - Lois P. Jones

We lost another calf
we lost another crop

We lost an uncle in the war

These are not like keys of city folk
that they find in their other coat

The things we lose out here
don’t come back any more

Thinking today of the people of Ukraine: The farmers and the city folk

1 Reply

The Magic of Moose Jaw

Audio Recordings, Cattle, Cows, Family, Nostalgia, Ranch Life, Relationships / February 20, 2022 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Who could sleep the night before
going to town in the truck with dad

Him and me in the front
white faced cows in the back
mooing it clear they wanted to stay
as much as I wanted to go

There would be the stockyards
and buildings bigger than a barn
and lunch at the Harwood Hotel
veal cutlets for him, burger for me

Two men together, five and thirty five
one driving home in the afternoon sun
one curled up on the seat

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