Afternoon with Irish Cows



Cows on the Mullet Peninsula, Western Ireland, 2008



AFTERNOON WITH IRISH COWS

by Billy Collins from Sailing Alone Around the Room:  New and Selected Poems (Random House)

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.

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 dumbfounded

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 see

the noisy one, anchored there on all fours,

her neck outstretched, her bellowing head

laboring 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.

Yesterday afternoon I was on the phone with a friend who was out taking a walk in a field in Virginia.  At one point during our conversation, she paused by a pond to let me hear a chorus of peepers that were deafeningly proclaiming their existence.  Later, as I drove through Rock Creek Park, I was treated to a snippet of a chorus from some Maryland peepers who were singing the same song.

It reminded me not only of this poem by Billy Collins, but also of something I heard recently in a David Whyte lecture.  He was talking about how human beings are the only animals who seem to feel at times as if they don't belong-- cows, peepers, and the rest of creation are simply what they were created to be.  The cow in the Collins poem is announcing her "unadulterated cowness," not lamenting the fact that she's not a sheep or a cloud or even a California cow.  Whyte goes on to say that rather than trying to overcome this sense of exile, perhaps we should try to embrace it as one of the "core competencies" of humanity; for it is precisely this element of being human that allows us to feel compassion for others, including the rest of creation. 

When have you experienced a sense of exile?

How have you experienced compassion?