There she stands with her broad back and a birth
bulge stomach. We wait an anticipating hour,
leaning at the door, patient as a January night-star.
But no stir of the calf inside the belly is there;
she just stands at the post, her head rattling the chains,
her black globule eye curious at our restlessness;
and the dog, hind-leg sits by the dung-stained door
in the feathery drizzle of rain.
Then you decide to force the birth,
and you plunge into her, up to your elbow
and up the narrow passage of her;
and two slimey-creamed hoofs you drag out,
and we wait for her to heave a birth push,
but she just stands there in calm insolence,
her black square head askance,
her eyes insouciantly squinting at us.
We loop the hair-ragged rope both ends to a hoof,
cleaned now, jerk tight behind the hocks,
and we pull and hold. A sudden wind
whooshes from the back of her, the water burst
of her membrane-thread hangs to the soiled hay.
We pull again; but she holds, rock-planted to the floor,
head straining at the post and we heave
and hold again ‘til a mouth snout sneaks out
and his black frightened eye gapes at us screaming: NO!
And we pull low and hold to the strain
until the full wet head slides out so fast her
belly sucks in with the strain, and he
still screeching: NO! his rump and back plops
onto the bed of hay, soiled in womb-slime.
With deft speed of hand you cradle his head
onto your knee and forcept your thumb and forefinger into his
slit mouth, and clear the gung-filled gap of his nostrils and
stand him up on unsteady legs to taste
the teat of beastings; but he slips and slithers,
a grey glob of wet soap on four hoofs crying: NO!
and NO! again, until the mother licks into the long
wet back of him and ruffles the coal blue coat with
her grey sand-paper tongue; then he stands up,
unsteady still, his mouth groping for the teat
and the gulp-suck of yellow milk. Crouching by them I
gaze out to the darkness, into the drizzling rain drifting
across the beam of light over the cow house door,
and wonder how our dog conjectures the scene: this
wet-matted calf sucking into the emerging dawn
