If carabaos can fly

I read an entry from the poet Marjorie Evasco at the University of Iowa. I am inspired by the intimacy between father and daughter, stranded along a dusty road in a bus load of people and farm products.  Noticing the 10 year old's agitation of having to wait for a much needed tire repair from who knows how far the nearest tire shop was, the father brings the  to a knoll.  

“From this lookout point, the rice in the paddies were ready for harvesting.  ‘Watch,’ my father instructed, pointing to a pond where two carabaos were cooling off. Suddenly, my father clapped his hands, and as if by magic, a flock of white birds flew out of the water behind the clump of cogon grass. The birds circled and took my heart with them as they flew away.  ‘Herons,’ my father named them. They were perfect in flight, and as the child I was, I must have associated beauty with motion.”  

Dr. Evasco shares with the 2002 IWP participants,  “I must also have associated magic with the way the hands can call forth things, and the way names can fix in memory a moment of transient wonder. Many summers hence, far from my family and away from the island of Bohol, I began to learn the language of flight, dream and memory I now call poetry.”

As I see it, the two carabaos stayed in the wallow, undisturbed by the spectacular show that dominated the sky. There were more important things for these beasts.  They wallow in the mud, stuffing as much sludge that will insulate them from the sun. And when the master calls, back to work they go. They are akin to laborers making the most of a fifteen minute coffee break.  Perhaps carabaos did not appeal to a ten year old then.

“I believe that once a poem is written, the poet can become invisible again until the next urging to sing the rattlesnake, grasshopper, centipede, cow dung or Buddha.” Dr. Evasco concludes “For the making of a poem is an eccentric act of faith that both the conjured up thing and the living presence of the world will someday awaken in another person's body of memories and dreams.”

Cow Dung?