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Jenny Ward Angyal

The Filly

Free for the first time in her life, the mare tears up and down the hilly paddock, sweat and sunlight shining on her burnished chestnut flanks. The girl watches for a moment, feeling the horse’s joy in her own bones. Then she takes up the pitchfork and returns to the sweet scent of hay.

the dance
of dust motes
in a shaft of light
all the selves
I’ve ever been

The wild tattoo of hoofbeats stops with a thud. The girl jumps lightly from the hayloft’s wide door. The mare has slipped and fallen in her careening flight and lies at the top of a stone retaining wall, her legs uphill from her body. Her head is flung back, barbed wire taut across her throat. Shouting to her friend to run for help, the girl drops to her knees and clasps the mare’s chin in both hands, pulling her head back to relieve the pressure of wire across the windpipe. 

diving deeper
into the dark pool 
of an eye—
currents of trust
sweep us together

A backhoe, men with wire-cutters. They take forever to arrive. A makeshift sling under the horse’s belly. The yellow machine straining and bucking. At last she’s on her feet, trembling.

seventy years on
and still the halter chafes—
I leap 
astride the bare back 
of a fast-running dream

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About the Author

Jenny Ward Angyal’s tanka have appeared widely in journals and in her collection, moonlight on water  (2016). She is tanka editor of Under the Basho.