From: PAUL THOMPSON

                REINCARNATION

"What is reincarnation?", a cowboy asked his friend.
"It starts", his old pal told him, "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.
Now the box and you goes in a hole that's planted 'neath that mound.
Them clods melts down just like the box and you who is inside,
and that's when you're beginning your transformation ride.
And in a while the grass will grow upon your rendered mound,
until some day upon that spot, a lonely flower is found.
And then a horse may wander by, and graze upon that flower,
that once was you and now's become your vegatative bower.
Now the flower that the horse done eat, along with other feed,
makes bone and fat a muscle, essential to the steed.
But there's a part that he can't use, and so it passes through,
and there it lies upon the ground, this thing thtat once was you.
And if prechance I should pass by, and see this on the ground,
I'll stop a while, and I'll ponder, at this object that I'ved found,
and I'll think about reincarnation, and life and death and such.
And I'll come away concludin', why, you ain't changed that much."

   -By Wallace Macraig; a Montana rancher-