In a field of foaming new snow
I saw a cantering horse of
warm blood, bronze and pride—
refined dignity, brazen freedom,
though corralled by humans.

How could this be?
The idea of captivity
was left, forgotten, outside
the fence and my admiration
chased him through the
dense world
into a valley of light
where the drumming sleet
became strings
of spirit in the solid world
that holds me.

What heals a stampede of
yesterdays when killing words
are branded everywhere?
What could make my inner riot
blur into a cloud of doves?

Rage:

I've seen your machetes slash
uninhabited hearts. I've seen you
gallop in like raiding Cossacks,
complete as the death we know,
unsparing as scythes
in the worshiping fields,

but I've seen you die as quickly
with a word
or the wisp of a thought,
even in the peril,
the elation,
of this strange, deep
immersion that passes for life,
even as it looks so real
on this side of the
earthly fence.

Mercy:

Just a taste, just a sip
and I enter the warm Universe
behind it all,
beyond the gaze of Polaris
and the blizzard of galaxies
where I am the contained
and the unbound
glint of the Unknowable,

so past all the stories,

so like the gleaming amber
sprinting in the snow.


Patricia Joan Jones