“Common Miracles”
For Kendall
We walk the country road
along the boundary of your neighborhood,
where a barbed wire fence
curtains the field. Cows graze the land;
horses roam
and collect at the small cedar clump
beside Robbins Creek.
We hear the bellow
before we see the cow on the ground,
her sides heaving
as she pushes a wet calf out of her body,
front feet and head first,
the birth broad and raw, and your face,
wide as the moon.
For a moment
you don’t speak, then questions gush
in the rush of water
and stand like the calf on shaky legs.
This is how ideas are born,
and poems, within the veiled chambers
of the heart.
This is how thoughts
travel paths under thin shade of cedars,
under birch and sycamore,
under moss that mounts starry eyes
along the creek bed.
This is how wishes wing their way
to hope, to belief.
The calf turns brown eyes
to halcyon sky. His mother licks and cuddles,
prods his first tentative steps.
We stand awed, witnesses to the breezes
browsing the tussock, drying
the calf’s fur, as the sun spreads glitter
across the potent land.
by Sandy Coomer
(winner of TN Mountain Writers poetry competition, first published in Yemassee (University of South Carolina), and also found in Sandy’s wonderful chapbook, Continuum)