I spent a morning beneath the steady gaze of a Belted Galloway cow at Two Coves Farm in Harpswell, Maine last week. Look at these eyes, they’ve got stories to tell.
Bubo is not particularly a fan of cows – she’s bothered by their slow and methodical movements and their massive exhalations. Interesting, isn’t it, that the very faults Bubo finds with cows are the aspects we humans enjoy the most?
This morning, I will also give you a delightful poem by Galway Kinnell. I could not help but enjoy the similarity between the names.
Daybreak
On the tidal mud, just before sunset,
dozens of starfishes
were creeping. It was
as though the mud were a sky
and enormous, imperfect stars
moved across it as slowly
as the actual stars cross heaven.
All at once they stopped,
and, as if they had simply
increased their receptivity
to gravity, they sank down
into the mud, faded down
into it and lay still, and by the time
pink of sunset broke across them
they were as invisible
as the true stars at daybreak.
“Daybreak,” by Galway Kinnell from A New Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin).
