A Poem for Horses

Reading Dianne Warren's Cool Water inspired me to reread the classic Saskatchewan novel As for Me and My House - I wanted to see whether I would like it now or still find it as awful as I did when I had to read it in high school. More on that later...

For now, the concatenation of Lee's experience with his horse in Cool Water, and the story of Mrs. Bentley in The Other Novel reminded me of a collection of poetry by Lorna Crozier. This collection, which I used in my recent poetry titles poem, is entitled A Saving Grace, and it is a poetic re-imagining of the voice of Mrs. Bentley. I'll talk about that collection a little later as well. But for now, here is a sample, a brief horse-themed poem:


Winter Horses

The horses pull into town
white with hoarfrost, huge
albino beasts from a fairy tale.

In my dreams I ride one
under a cold and flawless moon.
Nothing moves me
but this animal between my legs.

He knows where we are going
and takes me there
past the houses where everyone's asleep,
above the elevators, suddenly small.

When we cross the sky's great lake
black with ice, his hooves
strike sparks big as stars.


Lorna Crozier
from A Saving Grace: the collected poems of Mrs. Bentley