i love this poem and i love horses
ZM
i love horses. not in a home counties pony show way, i love horses in a Ada Limon, Clarice Lispector The Besieged City, lloyds TSB advert of the big horses running through the misty park in pounding silence kinda way. i love that horses are enormous and wild and powerful. i love the way they stomp and gallop over land, the way they gather together in fields as i fly past, gawking at them from the Avanti West Coast train window. i love that they are so big and brutal you think maybe, just maybe this thing could kill me? i love their shiny coats, their big muscly legs. i love that they have long alien heads and, even though it frightens me, i love that i can never ever know what is going on in their enormous horse-minds.
so it’s not that i’m a horse girl, it’s that i am jealous of horses for the power they hold as symbols and abstract figures and also as flesh and blood.
this poem arrived to me like a gift from the twitter algorithm - this month when Ada Limón became the US poet laureate. it has been galloping around my head ever since so this is a blog post in the hope that sharing it will exorcise/exercise this poem-thought. honestly, i have never been a poetry person. i think i prefer the prolonged beauty of full fat prose / long-distance rather than sprints. but How to Triumph Like a Girl is A Bit of Me. iiiiii love it.
