For Mobe; A Poem:
A COWBOY'S VIEW OF REINCARNATION
(By Wally McRee)
"What's reincarnation?" a cowboy asked his friend. His old pal told him:
It starts when your life comes to it's end: They comb your
hair and wash your neck and clean your fingernails and put
you in a padded box, away from life's travails. Then the box
and you goes in a hole that's been dug into the ground.
Reincarnation starts when you're planted beneath that mound.
Them clods melt down, just like that box and you inside - and
that's when you're beginning your transformation ride. And in
awhile the grass will grow upon your rendered mound until some-
day upon that spot a lonely flower is found. And then a "hoss"
will eat it along with his other feed - makes bone and fat
essential to the steed - but there's a part that the horse can't
use and so it passes through and there it lies upon the ground.
This thing that once was you, and if by chance I should pass by
and see this on the ground, I'll stop awhile and I'll ponder at
this object that I've found. And I'll think about reincarnation
and life and death and such, and I'll come away concludin' "Why,
you ain't changed all that much!"
