Below is a poem that is very much of the season, all mud and wet fields.
HORSES IN
WINTER
by William Oxley
from In The Drift Of Words (Rockingham
Press)
Alone or
in pairs like penitents they stand
in
unholy wind at the bleakest edge
of
fields of winter-gutted farmland
where
inedible ivy clings to crazy walls
and
trees offer bare ideas of form and age.
Some
wear coats like men in shabby overalls
or
chamois-naked stand log-still
fetlocked
in a mash of ice and mud.
I marvel
at their patience in such chill,
spare-ribbed
statues of neglect whose
wincing
flanks betray frost-detected blood,
and
think they have a dream
of
long-stalked days of green to come:
a special
dream – they must! – that will preserve
a sanity
and hope in horsey gloom,
which
nature files for all who do deserve
some
help through days of pre-death death
when
wind would drill the stars from night
and
freeze to glass bouquets a horse's breath
vainly
cropping at rigid spikes of spite
and
withered fodder far withdrawn
in
nettled corners of each sunless dawn.
