Good Morning!

_________________________________________

Welcome to The Coffee Shop, just for you early risers on Monday mornings.
This is an Open Thread forum, so if you have an off-topic opinion burning
a hole in your brainpan, feel free to add a comment.

_________________________________________

The cow is of the bovine ilk;
One end is moo, the other, milk.

– Ogden Nash

_________________________________________

Today is Black Cow Float Day.

Legend has it that a Black Cow Float was originally called a “Black Cow Mountain” because Frank Wisner, owner of a soda fountain in Cripple Creek, Colorado in the 1890s, was inspired by the snow on the peak of Black Cow Mountain to add a scoop of vanilla ice cream to root beer or cola. A spritz of chocolate syrup is optional.

_________________________________________

A Cow Kind of World

by Marilyn Lott

You know, I wouldn’t mind if I
Were living in a cow kind of world
Green grass and red dirt roads
A sky overhead with cloudy swirls

Just eating and having little chats
You don’t have a single care
Life is gentle and relaxing
At least no problems you’re aware

Following one another sometimes
Like to the shade or out of the rain
Or to the grain trough or pile of hay
They always want the very same

Moms and aunts share in calf-sittin’
While the babies take a little snooze
Everyone getting along it seems
Don’t feel they have a thing to lose

Yes, I think it would be a good life
If in my next time around I was hurled
Into the life that seems quite satisfying
In a comforting cow kind of world! 

_________________________________________

The Cow in Apple-Time

by Robert Frost

Something inspires the only cow of late
To make no more of a wall than an open gate,
And think no more of wall-builders than fools.
Her face is flecked with pomace and she drools
A cider syrup. Having tasted fruit,
She scorns a pasture withering to the root.
She runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten.
The windfalls spiked with stubble and worm-eaten.
She leaves them bitten when she has to fly.
She bellows on a knoll against the sky.
Her udder shrivels and the milk goes dry.

“The Cow in Apple-Time” from Complete Poems of Robert Frost, © 1964 by Lesley Frost Ballantine – Holt, Rinehart and Winston

_________________________________________

Hey, diddle, diddle

by Mother Goose

Hey, diddle, diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon;
The little dog laughed
To see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.

_________________________________________

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 the silver leaves
of milkweed beside the road,
gleaming before my car.

Yet I like driving at night
in summer and in Vermont:
the brown road through the mist

of mountain-dark, among farms
so quiet, and the roadside willows
opening out where I saw

the cows. Always a shock
to remember them there, those
great breathings 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,
and 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.
I stood by the fence. And then

very gently it began to rain.

“The Cows at Night,” from Toward the Distant Islands: New & Selected Poems, © 2006 by Hayden Carruth – Copper Canyon Press

_________________________________________