Horses of Construction
Mane bristle-rigid,
the black pony
drives hooves fast into red ground,
resists the pull.
In the fruit garden, every tree is in a row
and bowed low with stone fruit.
Beyond velvet plums and fizzy moon
along the dark wall
small Shetlands are espaliered head to tail on the top wire,
foreheads lowered, docile, blinking;
some with bulging skulls like embryos on a stave.
They look patient.
It seems inevitable.
My bent body screams no sound.
On the river path
a black mare grinds forward,
reined in close against the high wall,
led by the bit from above.
A wide blinker crosses from outside eye to brick,
so she sees no river.
She sees nothing
but wall.
The bricks
are each one different.
They grab her into
seething worlds
of red and yellow,
each scene newly thrown, like gravel,
at each blink,
each footfall.
The edge of the old clay pit
hosts biting stonecrop
and pimpernel.
They push through stone,
laugh over banks, and
gallop down
crumbling
gullies,
where a mare drinks
deep from silt-water,
her face reflected cloudy red.
Fianna (Fiona Russell Dodwell) is from Fife and lives in the Fens. She has had poems published in IS&T, I am not a silent poet and Three drops from a cauldron.