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CharlaXFabels

BovineFabel

ODE to a COW

 They stopped taking new admissions to the National Live Stock Association Prose and Poetry category in 1995 five years before the millennium began Denver Post: Flash: CharlaX Creates new category BOVINE poetry is saved.
She has to stand in pouring rain and let her calves suck sore titties no matter what she swings her head around to butt them but she swings it back she loves them. She has to walk for miles on hoofs that can be split she has to eat grass not fit for any use but prairie clodding holds the dirt and keeps the stobbing roots from leaving dry the rain keeps falling from the western sky she makes a mournful moo in the early mourning light of day is coming she is forming milk from weeds and grasses water found in puddles makes her chips seem like molasses hard to trail them in the rain the cattle move without the rangers cowboys wearing slickers yellow moving sideways in the saddle hoping for a dry relief from clouds so dark and gray when the copper runs out in the vein the miner does not stop the digging he keeps the dirt coming out in clods just hoping to strike color again moving great buckets of the stuff trying to get rich or only famous she has a brown spot on her right eye she can not see a cataract was formed from birth she strains her sight and tells no one her plight least of all her calves they follow her to lengths of sorrow falling down in mud so thick the cowboys tied the horses long ago they gave up the strays much like the Association gave up the Cowboy poems most of the oral presentations were for beer in bars and better coffee shops serve wine they JAM they have the  OPEN MIKE the end of time will catch us missing Cowboy Sam reciting odes to cattle there we swear too much and miss the love in camp where blankets used to be pulled near fires and poems read the saddles for the pillows there the coffee pot was red the poems read the men lay down the cattle slept the nearest town too far to ride the rain was absent from the sky. She struggled up the hill not slipping much she cried she lost her calves they died the creature heart within her just enlarged and there she fell to never once get up her spirit gone the Indian maiden from the creek found the skull bereft of meat the bone skull a lifelong prize she placed it near the trappings she was carrying to the nearest town she said a prayer while chanting she took the skull and gazed into its eyes and saw the cow.