The Earth Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Real cowboys taking siestas in the underbrush:
School buses shoplifting back and forth, vagabonding
Against the hedgerows
Who sing in little red and yellow buds that the coral
Snakes curl around awaiting the
Little girls in their fairytales;
And they just dream, of liquor and bullfighting,
Though the best of the herds have all dried up,
And their cenotaphs float in the sky like great wrecks
Who wreath back and forth on the holidays;
But really they are something that can never change:
The end result of a plentiful metamorphosis,
And the cowhands beneath them are great grandfathers
Themselves,
Their schoolboy forts taken back over by the Mexicans
Who came chanting with silver drums and boleros of
Enduring fire:
Now the airplanes evaporate through the sky: they seem to
Pollinate on them, a hedgerow of silver crosses fluttering;
And these old men, dust covered humbly,
Close their eyes and dream of things without wings that
Still somehow skip across the earth.