One white puff after another
and four-footed hooves in a leap over a half-moon—
that was the image in my mind when my mother
sent me back to bed after I whined I couldn’t sleep.
Go count sheep, she whispered.
The counting was never monotonous.
One minute, they were cotton balls of bouncy wool;
the next, tiny clouds of fluff with sheafs of glowing locks.
Then I was at school with Mary and her lamb
with fleece as white as snow. Or asking
Baa Baa Black Sheep if he had any wool.
And so it goes with sheep.
Like pacifists, they leave before fighting.
Inscrutable their docile, gentle affection,
their guide-me coexistence.
They form flocks as a bind of trust—
nose-to-tail, tail-to-nose—they
do not follow blindly.
Does the farmer see beyond the tail docking,
the field foraging, the yearly shearing?
They recognize his face and can manage
a complex maze. They fall in love,
form friendships, grieve when another dies.
All my life, the ovine
were behind barbwire, no petting
their V-shaped faces or pink ears.
The bleating echoed from hillsides.
Until today, with permission,
we walk the farmer’s dewy field
to find the ancient Irish portal tomb.
All around, they nonchalantly chew,
cloaked in wool coats, forever growing;
black scat scraps dangle from their bums.
When within a few feet, shy and meek,
they up and move.
A straggler particularly quickly.
The tomb now in sight.
Incomprehensive, the passage of time,
and yet here we are among
the lambs, free of fear or pain.
Still with tails, vigorously wagging,
some headbutt and some leap,
their back legs kicking to the sky.
Yvonne Leach’s first collection of poems, Another Autumn, was published in 2014 by WordTech Editions.
She has been published in literary magazines and anthologies in the United States. Her work has appeared in Cimarron Review, decomP Magazine, The MacGuffin, Midwest Quarterly, South Carolina Review, South Dakota Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Virginia Normal, Wisconsin Review, and Whitefish Review, among others. Her second book of poems will be published by Kelsay Books in the fall of 2023.