Afternoon With Goats

MY afternoon was full of silvery notes,
I looked over my hill, and there were goats
Light as young deer among my late red clover.
A stripling buck went leaping over and over
The gentle young she-goats with upright tail,
Forever the yearn, the mischief, and the male.

The heavy-uddered dam tried hard to be
The pattern of all staid propriety,
But even she at times could not restrain
The wine of clover in her and made rain
Of slender tinklings, silvery and thin,
For she carried music underneath her chin.

They all moved gentle and yet fast as fever
As though each one that cropped the grass had liever
Be in the sweet and tenderer grass elsewhere;
Half of the time their feel were on the air,
So fast they fed, so lean their twinkling graces.
All of them seemed to be in all the places.

Yet all these slender hungers dancing across
The late and golden light would have been lost
Had not a mother been there with her child
To keep the quicksilver beasts from running wild;
Being the center, she called them, made them mind,
She made the keen kids cousins of our kind.