Other animals ran only when they had a reason, but the horse would run for no reason whatever, as if to run out of his own skin.”

Rabindranath Tagore

Dora here, @PilgrimDreams.com, and welcome everyone to the dVerse Poets Pub!

For many of us it’s the height of summer still. Me? I’m simply melting over my keyboard as I write this with temperatures forecast in the upper, upper 90’s° F. It brings back childhood memories of summers spent in the southern Appalachian Mountains and my very first wondrously unforgettable experience of riding a horse, which is by way of introducing our prompt.

Our poetics prompt is simple: horses.

Use horse imagery in any way you like, either as the focus of your poem or in passing. In allusion or metaphor. An ekphrastic. Or just a mention will do.

A little horse talk —

(click on images and titles for a closer look and/or sources)

Horses! They’ve been a part of our landscape and imagination for thousands of years throughout many parts of the world.

Here in the United States, they were integral to the pioneering spirit of the early settlers as they wandered ever westward taking with them the horses they had brought from Europe. The native horse population had gone extinct long before European settlers arrived. In fact, for most of human history, the Americas had no horses at all despite the fact that they originally evolved here.¹

But when the horses arrived, they brought a new way of life to the indigenous and settler alike. Today on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Browning, Montana, horses are celebrated during the annual July “Running of the Horses.” Wild horses and ponies can be found all across the U.S., including the coastlines of Virginia and Maryland on Chincoteague and Assateague Islands. Those islands’ wild horses are believed to be descendants of horses on a Spanish galleon bound for America. The ship wrecked in a storm, but the horses were able to swim to safety on to the islands’ shores where they learned to survive on their own.

In order to feel our poetic oats, I’ve curated a few horse poems for us to look over.

They are by Jim Harrison, Pablo Neruda, Ted Hughes, Carol Ann Duffy, Edwin Muir, Emily Dickinson, Mary Oliver, and two by the current U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.

But first, a video that to me expresses the almost preternatural bond that exists between children and horses. What child hasn’t dreamed of owning her own special horse on whose legs she flies like the wind? And what child hasn’t yearned to be a cowboy or cowgirl riding over the plains in pursuit of game or a knight on his steed to battle dragons? And just look at the countless childrens’ books and stories on horses.

Yet when the books have been read, it boils down to the horse, his human companion, and what goes on between them.”

Walter Farley (author of The Black Stallion)

Not only do we bond and communicate with horses but there’s a special language between horses themselves.

“Horses” by Jim Harrison from Songs of Unreason

In truth I am puzzled most in life
by nine horses.

I’ve been watching them for eleven weeks
in a pasture near Melrose.

Two are on one side of the fence and seven
on the other side.

They stare at one another from the same places
hours and hours each day.

This is another unanswerable question
to haunt us with the ordinary.

They have to be talking to one another
in a language without a voice.

Maybe they are speaking the wordless talk of lovers,
sullen, melancholy, jubilant.

Linguists say that language comes after music
and we sang nonsense syllables

before we invented a rational speech
to order our days.

We live far out in the country where I hear
creature voices night and day.

Like us they are talking about their lives
on this brief visit to earth.

In truth each day is a universe in which
we are tangled in the light of stars.

Stop a moment. Think about these horses
in their sweet-smelling silence.

There’s something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.”

Winston Churchill

Horses by Pablo Neruda (trans. Lucy H. Boling)

I saw them from the window.

It was Berlin, in winter. The light
was lightless, the sky no sky.

The air white like damp bread.

And below my window, an empty arena
bitten by winter’s teeth.

Of a sudden, ten horses moved out
into the mist, led by a man.

They flickered as they came, like flames,
but in my eyes, they filled the world,
empty until that moment. Perfect, ablaze,
they were ten gods with long, flawless legs
and manes like the dream of salt.

Their buttocks were worlds, and oranges.

Their color was honey, amber, fire.

Their necks were towers
cut from the stone of pride,
and behind their furious eyes,
energy glared like a prisoner.

And there in the silence, in the middle
of the day, in the grim muddle of winter,
the vibrant horses were blood,
rhythm, alluring treasure of life.

I looked, I looked, and I was reborn: there,
unawares, was the fountain, the dance of gold, heaven, the fire that dwells in beauty.

I have forgotten winter in that dark Berlin.

I will not forget the light of the horses.

O lente, lente, currite noctis equi!” (“O run slowly, slowly, horses of the night!”)

Ovid’s “Amore” (Liber I, XIII, Line 40); the line is later used in Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus

The Horses by Ted Hughes

I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness

Not a leaf, not a bird –
A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood

Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.
But the valleys were draining the darkness

Till the moorline – blackening dregs of the brightening grey –
Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses:

Huge in the dense grey – ten together –
Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,

with draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making no sound.

I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.
Grey silent fragments

Of a grey silent world.

I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.
The curlew’s tear turned its edge on the silence.

Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun
Orange, red, red erupted

Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,
Shook the gulf open, showed blue,

And the big planets hanging –
I turned

Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards
The dark woods, from the kindling tops,

And came to the horses.
There, still they stood,
But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light,

Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves
Stirring under a thaw while all around them

The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.
Not one snorted or stamped,

Their hung heads patient as the horizons,
High over valleys in the red levelling rays –

In din of crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,
May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place

Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing the curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.

Listen to a video reading of Carol Ann Duffy’s “The White Horses” based on the thirteen white horses cut into the hillsides of Wiltshire in England (a transcript of the poem is included in the video).

What have we lost since the days when horses were ubiquitous for labor and travel? What can we regain?

The Horses by Edwin Muir

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
‘They’ll molder away and be like other loam.’
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers’ land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers’ time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.

Modes of travel and work may change but do we not still use equine terms like horsepower and stalking horse, and in adages (“don’t spare the horses!”) and, as Emily Dickinson, equine metaphors personifying machines into creatures of affection and admiration?

I like to see it lap the Miles – (383) by Emily Dickinson

I like to see it lap the Miles –
And lick the Valleys up –
And stop to feed itself at Tanks –
And then – prodigious step

Around a Pile of Mountains –
And supercilious peer
In Shanties – by the sides of Roads –
And then a Quarry pare

To fit its sides
And crawl between
Complaining all the while
In horrid – hooting stanza –
Then chase itself down Hill –

And neigh like Boanerges –
Then – prompter than a Star
Stop – docile and omnipotent
At its own stable door –

The following ekphrastic poem by Mary Oliver makes a painting of horses come to life, breathing a hope for humanity.

Franz Marc’s Blue Horses by Mary Oliver

I step into the painting of the four blue horses.
I am not even surprised that I can do this

One of the horses walks towards me.
His blue nose noses me lightly. I put my arm
over his blue mane, not holding on, just
commingling.
He allows me my pleasure.
Franz Marc died a young man, shrapnel in his brain.
I would rather die than try to explain to the blue horses
what war is.
They would either faint in horror, or simply
find it impossible to believe.
I do not know how to thank you, Franz Marc.
Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually.
Maybe the desire to make something beautiful
is the piece of God that is inside each of us.
Now all four horses have come closer,
are bending their faces toward me
as if they have secrets to tell.
I don’t expect them to speak, and they don’t.
If being so beautiful isn’t enough, what
could they possibly say?

That some people are happy to live their lives around horses is almost as baffling as the fact that horses are happy to live their lives around humans.”

Anonymous

Some years ago, poet Ada Limón, the current Poet Laureate of the United States, moved from New York City to the horse country of Lexington, Kentucky, where every year the most famous horse race in the world is run, the Kentucky Derby. In a book called “Bright Dead Things,” she writes about adjusting to a new home, and the constant talk of thoroughbreds. “People always asking, ‘You have so many horses in your poems—what are they a metaphor for?’” she told the New Yorker Radio Hour. “I think they’re not really a metaphor. Out here, they’re just horses.” Hear her read the following poem in the latter half of this podcast episode here.

How to Triumph Like a Girl by Ada Limón

I like the lady horses best,
how they make it all look easy,
like running 40 miles per hour
is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.
I like their lady horse swagger,
after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up!
But mainly, let’s be honest, I like
that they’re ladies. As if this big
dangerous animal is also a part of me,
that somewhere inside the delicate
skin of my body, there pumps
an 8-pound female horse heart,
giant with power, heavy with blood.
Don’t you want to believe it?
Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see
the huge beating genius machine
that thinks, no, it knows,
it’s going to come in first.

The Foaling Season by Ada Limón

1

In the dew-saturated foot-high blades
of grass, we stand amongst a sea

of foals, mare and foal, mare and foal,
all over the soft hillside there are twos,

small duos ringing harmoniously in the cold,
swallows diving in and out, their fabled

forked tail where the story says the fireball
hit it as it flew to bring fire to humanity.

Our friend the Irishman drives us in the Gator
to sit amongst them. Everywhere doubles

of horses still leaning on each other, still nuzzling
and curious with each new image.

2

Two female horses, retired mares, separated
by a sliding barn door, nose each other.

Neither of them will get pregnant again,
their job is to just be a horse. Sometimes,

though, they cling to one another, find a friend
and will whine all night for the friend

to be released. Through the gate, the noses
touch, and you can almost hear—

Are you okay? Are you okay?

3

I will never be a mother.

That’s all. That’s the whole thought.

I could say it returns to me, watching the horses.

Which is true.

But also I could say that it came to me

as the swallows circled us over and over,

something about that myth of their tail,

how generosity is punished by the gods.

But isn’t that going too far? I saw a mare

with her foal, and then many mares

with many foals, and I thought, simply:

I will never be a mother.

4

One foal is a biter, and you must watch
him as he bares his teeth and goes
for the soft spot. He’s brilliant, leggy,
and comes right at me, as if directed
by some greater gravity, and I stand
firm, and put my hand out first, rub
the long white marking on his forehead,
silence his need for biting with affection.
I love his selfishness, our selfishness,
the two of us testing each other, swallows
all around us. Every now and then, his
teeth come at me once again; he wants
to teach me something, wants to get me
where it hurts.

---

What do horses mean to you? In what ways do you relate to them, if at all? Join me in putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, and let’s horse around with equine thoughts, writing a poem (or two) using as inspiration these magnificent animals – their lives so intertwined with ours over the centuries.

New to dVerse? Here’s how to join in:

• Write a poem in response to the challenge.
• Post your poem on your blog and link back to this post.
• Enter your name and the link to your post by clicking Mr. Linky below (remember to check the little box to accept the use/privacy policy).
• Read and comment on your fellow poets’ work –- there’s so much to derive from reading each other’s writing: new inspiration, new ideas, new friends. Enjoy!