The Tuesday Poem: Afternoon with Irish Cows

There were a few dozen who occupied the field`across the road from where we lived,stepping all day from tuft to tuft,their big heads down in the soft grass,though I would sometimes pass a window and look out to see the field suddenly empty as if they had taken wing, flown off to another country.

Picture by Suzannah Gilman

Then later, I would open the blue front door,and again the field would be full of their munching or they would be lying down on the black-and-white maps of their sides,facing in all directions, waiting for rain.How mysterious, how patient and dumb founded they appear in the long quiet of the afternoon.

But every once in a while, one of them would let out a sound so phenomenal that I would put down the paper or the knife I was cutting an apple with and walk across the road to the stone wall to see which one of them was being torched or pierced through the side with a long spear.

Yes, it sounded like pain until I could seethe noisy one, anchored there on all fours,her neck outstretched, her bellowing head labouring upward as she gave voice to the rising, full-bodied cry that began in the darkness of her belly and echoed up through her bowed ribs into her gaping mouth.

Then I knew that she was only announcing the large, unadulterated cowness of herself,pouring out the ancient apologia of her kind to all the green fields and the gray clouds,to the limestone hills and the inlet of the blue bay,while she regarded my head and shoulders above the wall with one wild, shocking eye.

* Billy Collins is the USA’s best-selling poet. He reads at the Cork Spring Poetry Festival (www.corkpoetryfest.net) on Feb 13. His latest book is Aimless Love, New & Selected Poems (Picador)