Thomas Lux's "Cow Chases Boys"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 14 August 2023

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

Today’s poem is by Thomas Lux (December 10, 1946 – February 5, 2017), an American poet who held the Margaret T. and Henry C. Bourne, Jr. Chair in Poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology and ran Georgia Tech's "Poetry @ Tech" program.[1][2] He wrote fourteen books of poetry.[3]

—Bio via Wikipedia

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:04.4	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, August 14th, 2003.
0:10.3	Today's poem is by contemporary poet Thomas Lux, and it's called Cow Chases Boys.
0:18.8	I will read it once, offer a few comments, and then read it one more time.
0:27.8	Cow Chases Boys by Thomas Lux.
0:34.0	What we were thinking was bombing the cows with dirt balls from the top of the sandbank,
0:38.9	at the bottom of which ran a cave-cold brook, Spring-Born.
0:43.4	We knew the cows would pass below to drink, and we pried out our clumps of dirt from a crumbling ledge.
0:50.5	Here, August, lasted a million years.
0:53.4	There was no we. I can tell you that now.
0:56.8	I did this alone.
0:58.8	At one cow I knew as old and cloudy-eyed, I threw the dirt balls as if it were a sport at which
1:04.3	I was skilled.
1:05.3	Boom, a puff of dust off her hip.
1:07.6	Boom, boom.
1:09.1	Drilled her ribs and neck and one more too close to where she made
1:12.2	her milk. She swung around and chased me up an apple tree. Her rage surprised me and her alacrity.
1:19.7	She looked up. I looked down at her. As with many things, I did this alone. We both knew
1:27.4	we'd soon be called home.
1:34.2	This is a wonderful August poem for a number of reasons.
1:40.1	One, because it's set in August,
1:43.6	and two, because, as I've mentioned recently in other episodes
	...

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