The Weaning Pen

Mother kept the memory
of the early weanings
when I was to young to understand
the din that frightened me.
The house wasn’t as separated
from the working ranch
and the distraught mother cows
were right outside our windows.
She remembered my fright.
I wish I could remember how
she comforted me.

I do remember my part
as a teenage cowboy
in the separating pens.
The old man at the gate
working us cowhands
just like the cattle.
We all danced to his tune,
but it was the weanlings and their mothers
that paid the piper.
The cows and calves bawling back and forth
further from my window
but this time blaming me.

Until the third night
their new life begun as quiet reigned.
The mothers back to pasture
the weanlings at the trough.
Cotton seed meal
slacking a greater hunger
so that each morning I was the mother
spilling open the hundred pound sacks
as they pressed close.

I was always coy about their fate
careful not to tell them why I seemed so kind.
Of course they wouldn’t have understood
that it was me I was protecting,
posturing in the face of my own weaning soon to come,
wearing a brave face before an agitated mind,
pretending that true love doesn’t matter
if it can be taken away without one's consent.