We raise all kinds of animals on our farm and are surrounded by birth, life and death throughout the year. All of the animals are precious to us and we celebrate their life cycle in our own way with them. Each, whether a sheep, goat, goose, duck, chicken, pig, horse or cow, have their own distinct characteristics. The poem below is about cows, but also about farms. Most of you never give a thought as your drive at high speed during the night in rural ares to what might be me just outside of the road's edge. Too often all you see is the glare of a security cutting the night.

If you have ever been to Vermont, you can appreciate a night with little light and the miles of farms in the valleys laying there waiting for the sun. There are few people in rural Vermont and the distances, while short, seem to be longer due to the isolation of each farmstead. Meadows and corn fields, growing or cut, and dairy cows are the totality of the landscape.

Here in East Texas it is different. Land fragmentation has subdivided the pastoral scenes with the intrusion of one house after the another on 1-2 acre lots to larger pieces of land. Long vistas of rural landscape are seldom seen. Our farm is unique in that is is a bit isolated and we own enough to allow us to control what we see. At the Rocky Branch Grass Ranch we have long vistas, but in the distance the are spoiled by civilization. Karl planted trees to create a living screen in time.

I enjoy most our cattle and at night they are huge animals breathing slowly in the dark. Maybe all cow eyes are on the sad side, but none sadder than on a Jersey cow.
In any case, I hope that you enjoy Hayden Carruth's peom and in your mind's eye see what he saw.


The Cows at Night
by Hayden Carruth

The moon was like a full cup tonight, too heavy,
and sank in the mist soon after dark, leaving
for light faint stars and silver leaves of milkweed
beside the road, gleaming before my car.

Yet I like driving at night in the summer in Vermont.
The brown road through the mist of mountain-dark,
among farms so quiet, and the roadside willows
opening out where I was the cows. Always a shock
to remember them there, those great breathings so
close in the dark.

I stopped, and took my flashlight to the pasture
fence. They turned to me where they lay, sad and
beautiful faces in the dark, I counted them-forty
near and far in the pasture, turning to me, sad
and beautiful like girls very long ago who
were innocent and sad because they were innocent,
and beautiful because they were sad. I switched off
my light

But, I did not want to go, not yet, nor knew what to
do. If i should stay, for how in that great darkness
could I explain anything, anything at all. And then
very gently it began to rain.

"The Cows At Night" by Hayden Carruth from Toward the Distant Islands: New & Selected Poems. © Copper Canyon Press, 2006