CALLING UP GRIEF
In dead of winter
“under the night sky she mounted a mare and rode”
No one knew where she rode
On those dark and dreary nights
She always pointed to the paint
Brown and white, in the field
She always said it was hers
The one she rode under the night sky
A pretty little girl
Sheltered and protected from
All things that hurt
And yet, over time
Hurt would find her
Like a spell
Cast long ago
Her urge to ride
Could come at any time
Was not limited
To the dead of winter
She said, she was “calling up grief”
August 9, 2018
Wordy Thursday with Wild Woman ~ Piggyback Poems
the Umbilicus
Horses were turned loose in the child’s sorrow.
They galloped bare-boned, tore up her imagination’s
pasture. Simple things became surreal, malevolent –
a shoelace, a windup toy, the cross of a t
or the lost dot in her mother’s eye. Continents of grief
to traverse. She hadn’t yet seen the tidily grassed graves
at Arras or families rounded up in town squares, poisoned
blankets covering bodies in Haida Gwaii. Sometimes
under the night sky she mounted a mare and rode
into morning, through sunflowered bonfires, through
sermons and eulogies, past incense and teargas
till she reached the saltwater tide. She never knew
if she had swallowed sadness through her umbilicus,
joined still to her mother’s placental algebra.
The girl sat awhile, gazing out over the waves
to the rapidly rising sun, then dismounted,
looking to her left, looking to her right –Maureen Hynes
[Note: “The horses were turned loose in the child’s sorrow” is the first line of Carolyn Forche’ ‘s poem, “Sequestered Writing”, from Blue Hour (New York: Harper Collins, 2003; “Looking to the left, looking to the right. She-” is the last line of Gail Scott’s “Heroine” (Toronto: Coach House, 1987).]
“under the night sky she mounted a mare and rode” one line from The Horses, the Sorrow,
the Umbilicus—Maureen Hynes
“calling up grief” one line from Ponte Dell’ Abbadia –Kathleen Fraser
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