☀️ The Daily Boost #824

Watch the world stand on new legs

Photo by Elevage De Garros

THE BLUE HORSE
Dane Cervine

My mother wakes me at 3am, hands me a flashlight.
I put on old shoes, a jacket, follow her
to the barn where my father is already
kneeling by the white mare. Her eyes
are wild, her breath filling the cold air
with steam. But her muscled flanks
and immense torso know how to do this:
birth the impossible, life
from almost nothing. One egg,
one sperm, small as a thought,
an instinct, a desire. I had wanted
to see this, said, Wake me
no matter what. And here it is,
the new foal, impossibly folded
emerging from the mare in a blue silky sack,
as though brought here from deep under water
or an incomprehensibly distant star.
I stare like a virgin. This
a second birth, my own
vanished into bone memory.
But this horse: a kind of god.
In the dead of night,
I kneel in dirt,
watch his mother lick
the liquid sea from his fur,
nudge him to wobbly knees,
watch him stand.

(My thanks to Dane Cervine, via

Kenneth Salzmann

’s How to Grow a Poem.)

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