Nostalgia – Page 15 – Neil Meili

Neil Meili

Zen Cowboy Poet & Freelance Philosopher

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Category: Nostalgia

Mom, Happy Birthday

Audio Recordings, Farm, Nostalgia, Ranch Life, Relationships, Remembering / tagged Love, Mother / October 3, 2019 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Oh we would circle
rattling tin-wheeled trucks and trikes
and drive her crying to her bed

Gather soot enough from here and there
to keep her forever scrubbing
at our souls and skins

And worry her near to death
while she stayed up to worry us alive
from many a snow and beer-filled drive

I know she does it to this day
and I’m afraid anything else I’d say
would all be mush and love
and angels watching from above
and yet still, I think I will

Thinking of my Mom today, on what would have been her 102nd birthday.

Gopher Tails

Audio Recordings, Farm, Nature, Nostalgia, Ranch Life / September 27, 2019 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

When I was seven
gopher tails were three cents

The county had a bounty
to arrest the little pest
not exactly a price on their heads
but you get the picture

So we hauled buckets of water
to drown them out
Learned from the bigger boys
how to tie a noose in binder twine
Placed it around the hole
and waited

Curiosity
which has been known to kill cats
is not very good for gophers either

Once caught
they were run in mad races
spun to centrifugal asphyxiation
or finished off in other cruel ways
before yielding us our hard-earned bounty

In the spring we watched their return
to the snow-speckled pasture
running tumbling wrestling
making love

And the wonderful babies
when they first ventured out
to try sunshine, grass and shaky legs

It amazes me now
that as boys we could take
such joy in their playful beauty

and in their deaths

2 Replies

Grandpa’s Upstairs Porch

Nature, Nostalgia, Ranch Life, Relationships, Remembering / September 26, 2019 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

The only scenery was sky
the only light was lightning

Five of us sibled summer nights
blanketed against the cooling air

Watching storms from forever away
til they rained us to our beds

1 Reply

Why the Collectors Aren’t Collecting my Comic Book Collection

Nostalgia / tagged Childhood, Siblings / September 25, 2019 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Peanut butter
bacon, candy and mud

Roll em up fold em up
lug them everywhere love

and brothers

1 Reply

New Hay

Farm, Nature, Nostalgia, Ranch Life / tagged Harvest / September 9, 2019 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

The scent of hay
thrown upward in the cutting

Too rich and heavy to remain aloft
falls back to lie among its fallen friends

Walk shuffling small feet through it
and it lifts again in clouds to nostrils

Breathed in sweet particles remain
I do believe … there’s some there yet

Photo by Boba Jovanovic on Unsplash

Learning from Grandparents

Audio Recordings, Nostalgia, Relationships / tagged Family, grandparents, Grandparents Day / September 8, 2019 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

From my Swiss grandfather
who dreamed and grew a prairie Eden
combining Europe and Hy-Brasil
I learned the impossible is possible

From my English grandmother
I learned that niceness is very nice
but you can leave feeling empty
except for cookies and milk

From my father’s mother
and my mother’s father
I learned that early death
is a form of theft

Hy-Brasil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brasil_(mythical_island)

Edible Books

Nostalgia, Poems about Poetry / tagged Literature, reading / September 6, 2019 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up
of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all
my life. - Giorgos Seferis

A hut may be a granary, a mansion a desert

Where are the books piled Dagwood deep
Where does your mother read you to sleep

Where do the mangos of the South
and the spices of the East mix in feast

Image by Nino Carè from Pixabay

Chinese Restaurant

Nostalgia, Ranch Life, Remembering, Travel / August 28, 2019 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Sorry John Donne
but some men may be islands

or castaways
in small prairie towns
fifty miles by bad road
from any other of their race

Tall walled booths along one side
twisted-wire chairs and tables too
my father and his friends had coffee
I think mine was cream soda

We may have eaten there
but I don’t remember
certainly at five or six
I would not have imagined
that we were as strange to him
as he was to us

All I ever knew
of the inner man
was the pungent foreignness
of the old two-holer out back
Fast forward six years or so
to small town of Mossbank
on the south side of the lake

A chubby twelve year old
sits in a low walled booth
with his best buddies
and another Chinese man
in another Chinese café
serves up Vanilla Cokes
(when vanilla still had alcohol)
and marks our tabs with
Chinese signs

I asked him what my three mean

Big – Small – Happy

1 Reply

Black Beauty

Audio Recordings, Farm, Nostalgia, Ranch Life, Remembering / tagged Cats / August 27, 2019 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

When we moved to Grandfather’s
old farm
no one had been living there for a while
and all the cats had gone wild

We found a litter of kittens
hidden deep in a corner of the loft
and among them
the most beautiful black and white kitten

Spitting and crouching under the eaves
she scratched us all to the bone
If I’d been a tree there would
have been six rings

Much persistence and we got her out
much time and love and we tamed her
if one ever really tames a cat
Best cat ever
adopted by our cousins when we moved
and one of the things we most looked forward
to on our visits was Black Beauty and her newest of who knew how many litters

The tomcats in that town were also
excellent judges of beauty

Growing Into It

Audio Recordings, Nostalgia, Personal Growth / August 25, 2019 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Remember all those hand-me-ups
all at least two sizes too big
mother bought for you

You look like a clown but don’t dare frown
it’s frugal and wise so don’t roll your eyes

“Be careful, be careful please”
but you’re all elbows and knees

Before they half fit they all look like shit
so it’s back to the store to try it once more
and your behind is behind two sizes again

Childhood patterns are hard to break

Growing out of school, marriage, and every
job I’ve ever had before I really got it
before I was even big enough to fit

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