Reincarnation
By Wallace McCrae

What is reincarnation a cowboy asked his friend.
Why it's something that happens when your life has reached its end.
They comb your hair and wash your neck and clean your fingernails,
And lay you in a padded box away from life's travails.

Now this box and you goes in a hole that's been dug into the ground.
And reincarnation starts once you're planted 'neath the mound.'
Pretty soon the clods melt down
Along with the box and you who are inside,
And then you're just beginning on your transformation ride.

One day some grass will grow upon your rendered mound.
Until on your moldered grave a little flower will be found.
Then say by chance a horse should wander by and graze upon that flower,
That once was you and now has become your vegetative bower.
Now the posy that that horse done ate along with other feed,
Becomes fat and bone and muscle, essential to the steed.
But some is consumed that he can't use and so it passes through,
Until it lays there on the ground.
This thing that once was you.

And then I see's this thing upon the ground,
And I wonder and I ponder at this object that I found.
And I begin to think about reincarnation and life and death and such.
And I come away concluding, old pal,
You ain't changed all that much!