Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Horses would fashion their gods as horses. Xenophanes.

Horses with wings and horses with shoes.
White stallions sacrificed to Roman gods.
Scythian kings buried with fifty horses.

Horse sense: a perpetual expectation
of danger. Cave dwellers drove herds
over cliffs for an easy killing.

                         *

Drawings found in a tomb suggest
the ancient Egyptians were among the first
to ride horses.

Warm bloods, stud books,
a government incentive for the Irish Draught,
the only ever accidental Cob,

the Arab’s dished face and seventeen ribs,
the recessive Albino, chosen mount
of the Lone Ranger and Emperor Hirohito.

                         *

Horse points, fetlock and foreleg.
As in football or driving,
an offside.

Gervase Markham’s horse skeleton
(‘worse than approximate’) misled readers
for twenty-one editions and a hundred years

until Auzoux’s papier-mâché model,
each flayed muscle, artery and bone
labelled with scraps of Latin and French.

                         *

The horse in war, legendary siege-breaker
turned fast offensive transport.
Army vets botching it with gas masks,

paraffin salve and cocaine. Running my hand
along the hooked spine of a broken-backed
roan crippled by a bite from his father.

                         *

How we still measure distance from on horseback.
Matisse driven at a walking pace
to keep a sense of the trees.

Fox Talbot on a train in 1838,
wanting to go no faster than that.
My childhood horse future

of great escapes, crossing the desert
on a wall-eyed skewbald, leaving it
up to the horse gods. Horse talk.

I can offer no greater sign of trust
than to say you are someone with whom
I would steal horses.