A Cow is Abducted by a UFO (after The Two-headed Calf by Laura Gilpin)
The calf is still calling for her as the dark slides away across the fields
And the farmer strokes her neck
And he tells her it'll be alright, because his daughter has a soft heart, and she feeds the orphans and the rejects with a bottle made from a milk jug, and she only cries a little when he takes them to the cattle sale
And he never will know what happened to that one heifer
And for the rest of his life it will come back to him while he's mending fences or driving steers into the pens or lying in his bed in the wakeful, watchful dark
One of those mysteries that will never be solved
And he won't connect his missing cow with the lights they saw in the sky two towns over
Or the boy who wandered off by the river
Who they found 20 miles away, barefoot, confused
Or that one place out on the back roads where the clock in his truck always jumps a few minutes ahead
And the radio goes fuzzy and distorted
And the static sounds a little bit like his mother's voice
Saying that he has a soft heart
And he'll never know that in the dark that night
The stars drifted into strange new shapes
And a wind came up from nowhere
That even as the cow rose into the sky, lifted by a shining silver disc
Because she finally knew how to fly
(For @mochacoffee and @racketghost)