Tag Archives: cow

Acrostic sonnet: Mike Mesterton-Gibbons, ‘Veronika The Cow’

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(Science has reported the first evidence in cattle of
using a single tool for multiple purposes, a skill 
previously seen only in humans and chimpanzees.) 

Veronika the cow can wield a broom,
Enabling her to scratch her back and breast,
Relieving itch. This Austrian, for whom
Old age brings fame, is now the manifest
New poster-girl for multi-purpose tools
In use by livestock, widely thought to lack
Keen intellect. But what if they aren’t fools
And, copying Veronika, attack
The status quo with brooms held high – if smart
Hoofed animals refuse to constitute
Earth’s humans’ prime rib roast supply and start
Campaigns to claim their basic right, pursuit
Of happiness? . . . Will humans have a beef
With Austria’s tool-user-cow-in-chief?

*****

Mike Mesterton-Gibbons writes: “Yes, Veronika uses opposite ends of the broom for different purposes. There’s a nice video of her in action on the Science website where I first read about her. The article and video are here: https://www.science.org/content/article/no-bull-austrian-cow-has-learned-use-tools“

Mike Mesterton-Gibbons is a Professor Emeritus at Florida State University who has returned to live in his native England.  His poems have appeared in Current Conservation, the Ekphrastic Review, Light, Lighten Up Online (where this poem was first published), the New Verse News, Oddball Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, WestWard Quarterly and other journals. Links to all these poems can be found at  https://www.math.fsu.edu/~mesterto/Unscramble/wordplay.html. In 2025 he won the Children’s Unpublished category of the Eyelands Book Awards with Flora’s Flock and Other Stories to Read Aloud.

“Veronika’s tooling technique and targeted areas (cow tools)” by Antonio J. Osuna-Mascaró, Alice M. I. Auersperg is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Poem: ‘Winter Night Roads’

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Full midnight moon on fields that yield but snows,
Air apple-clean, crisp, sweet
In lungs and nose,
The only sound your feet
Past silent woods –
Inhaling moods and modes
Of midnight roads.

In twenty minutes, you hear only this:
A dog bark twice. An owl hoot once.
A horse snort by a fence.
Some heavy breath behind a hedge: a cow.
A mile away a car’s lights show, then go.
You walk unknown, alone, towards some place
With light and life, perhaps a warm cafe
To make a break in travelling towards day.

This quiet little winter poem (sorry about the timing, Australia…) was first published in The Orchards Poetry Journal. The editors tend toward the bucolic and the formal… but they make exceptions, thank goodness, because this piece is not quite formal. It may be in iambics, but without a pattern to the line length or to what rhyme there is.

But it’s true to the winter outdoor experience–and pleasant enough, so long as you have good boots and adequate clothes!

Photo: “Moonlight” by Jyrki Salmi is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0