Pasture (In Reply To Billy Collins And His Irish Cows) Poem by Suzanne Hayasaki

Here I stand
On this rocky piece of land
Head to the wind
Calf to my lee
My mind as empty as the sky.

The clouds pass by
Creating patches on the grass
Making the field resemble my hide
And yet I notice nothing
But the hot and cold on my back
And the flies buzzing around my ears and eyes.
I twitch; I flick my tail; I shift my weight
But I continue to stand
Planted as I am
In my own space.

Occasionally, I bellow.
I let loose a sound from deep in my bowels.
I announce to the world that I am.
Sometimes my fellow cows answer
With a friendly affirmation of our shared state.

For us there is only today,
The cold, the heat.
The pasture, the feed.
But so long as we have water,
The shelter of the barn when we need it
And this vast green and gray
Universe for us to inhabit,
We are content.

Let that man standing outside my sphere
Gaze upon me with his curious eye.
My mind will remain as it has always been,
Satisfied with what I am, as I am, now.