DISPONIBLE ICI DANS UNE VERSION EN FRANÇAIS
Man walking a workhorse
Along a riverbank
Calmly pacing
Almost matching
Stride for stride
Towards the undertaking
Beneath a railway bridge
They come to a halt
Eyeing each other
Almost shyly so
Side by side
Life-locked in labour
Until here comes the train
Bang on time clanging
The arches trembling
Almost jangling
Ride over ride
Needling the nerves
But the horse's head nods
Acknowledging a fact
Barely flinching
Almost snorting
Pride matches pride
A fine friend for funerals
A scratch on the withers
A word in the ear and away
A word in your ear
This piece first came to life as a spontaneous oral story when talking casually late one ordinary afternoon with friends about whether narrative could just come out of the air. Without warning, the man and the horse walking together were suddenly there in my mind. I spoke them. Continuing to speak, I followed them to the bridge where the story unfolded all on its own.
Days passed, and the thing kept coming back, wouldn’t let me be. Forced to think about it, I realised it was in fact an echo of an anecdote I’d forgotten about Irish ancestors on our mother’s side who raised horses long ago in County Cork. Their not being people we knew, we had to take her word for it. But there it was, the same story. So in order to be free of it, I wrote it down. I must confess that the riverbank part may have been pure imagination on my part, but she did say that in her family they used to test a horse’s nerves by standing them under the railway bridge when the train was due. In the days when life expectancy was a great deal shorter than it is today, there was a demand for calm horses from undertakers looking for individuals able to keep steady when surrounded by mourners and the general distress at funerals.
In writing and sharing this poem I don’t feel any nostalgia at all for that lost time because the oral memory is sufficient connection. But I do wonder what has happened to that knowledge now : the ability to identify in another living being the ability to absorb others’ suffering, then to nurture it and use it to make a contribution to community life. Can we really see those things disappearing for good? To say nothing of the scratch on the withers rather than a pat to congratulate a horse : are we still able to invent and use langauges like these, perfectly adapted to our interlocutors, however different they may be to ourselves? That stuff hasn’t gone away. The potential to do this is here somewhere.
Anyway, thanks for following my scratching this far. Here’s wishing you a safe onward journey.
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