My Life In Word

ELEGY FOR THE BREATHING HORSE

Beneath the pallid winter boughs
Where daylight wanes and shivers thin,
A sable horse, with lowered brows,
Stands cloaked in fog and breath and sin.
Its nostrils bloom with ghostly fire,
A vapor born of hidden heat,
As though the soul, grown cold and tired,
Still whispered live through lungs and beat.
The leather creaks. The iron waits.
The reins lie slack, yet bind the air.
No rider speaks. No hand dictates.
The silence bears a heavier care.
Each exhale curls like vanished speech—
A word the body will not keep,
A truth too near the bone to reach,
Released, at last, into the deep.
Around it, trees with crooked arms
Arch like a tribunal of grief,
Their branches spelling ancient harms
In alphabets of withered leaf.
O patient beast, whose breath remains
Though warmth retreats from sky and ground,
You teach what mortal flesh retains
When all the world grows still—
the sound
of staying.

Simona A. Brinson

Photo by Anand Thakur on Unsplash

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