Donald Mace Williams

Approaching Herd
      A painting by Frank Reaugh, in the Panhandle-Plains
      Historical Museum, Canyon, Texas

They have come over the rise, these fifteen Longhorns,
And the heads and horns of more are just behind.
Of the front bunch, the pale one with high head,
Alert and even speculative, and
Delicate in spite of weighing, surely,
A ton, has horns swept up like wondering eyebrows:
Why is that gray-haired cowboy sitting there
On a small, cross-leggèd wooden horse
And holding, not reins, but a bristly stick
And staring at me as if looking for
A difference from my companion steers?
The other cattle plod with glum heads down,
Hoping, if they hope anything, the man
Doesn't intend to brand them with that stick
As if they had turned into calves again.
No barbed-wire fences show behind the herd,
But nearby those grow exponentially.
The Longhorns' time is almost finished, since
Postholes are sinking and house-skeletons
Rising, unseen as yet by them. Today,
Beneath jet trails, captive and on display,
Three remnant ruminants with horns as wide
As flatbeds chew hay in their little pen,
Thinking of nothing more than food, if that,
Not noticing the picture-taking tourists.

Donald Mace Williams is a retired newspaper writer and editor with a Ph.D. in Beowulfian prosody. His second book of poems, The Nectar Dancer, was published in August 2023 by Stoney Creek Publishers, and his new translation, Beowulf: For Fireside and Schoolroom, also from Stoney Creek Publishers, has just been published and is available at https://www.tamupress.com/book/9798987900277/beowulf/. He lives in Austin.