HOLY COW

She grazed the heartland's last stubble
of grass,
chewing those purple flowers,
swatting away flies with her tail
|and taunting them for being
such hangers-on for life.
But she is calm,
has always been,
almost stubborn in her grandstanding
way of just observing life,
one day at a time.

That was until she found polythene,
her mortal enemy,
ingested with crystalline pieces of
glass,
lying foul in her intestines,
like a snake in the grass.

***

HOLY COW

There has to be a cursed reckoning,
a most ominous end for such a silent
observer,
a sort of predictive bovine tolerance
for inherent human cruelty
that its death incites such soul-
crushing grief,
for even casual bystanders.

It's like a mother butchered by
midnight bandits,
taking away her fortunes of being,
with an assault on her senses.
One knife point,
blunting the language of
ultraviolence.
Until we realize the violence in words
and society's silent auction of her
innocence,
has always been a sting in our eyes.
Silent, the victim.
Silent, the bystander.
Her.
We.

***

HOLY COW

Every mother sits on the cow's body,
as a child undisturbed by fate
or even as a Goddess in that image.
Until both lie submerged
in the rain-lashed lake,
on the face of a soulless ether,
split into iconographies of a shared
destiny.
One held by the horns,
One to the manner born.

***