Horses of Poetry

The horses of

poetry sleep

standing up, in

paddocks of ink

Together, they

run down the long-

shadowed morning,

grazing each word

in the mind’s deep

grass, with soft lips

prehensile as

a monkey’s tail

and the teeth of

a beauty queen, long

straight and white, like

the bones they are.

They toss their manes

proudly, and prance

as though there’s a

mirror, somewhere

So gorgeous, such

Rippling beauty,

the muscular,

enchanted flesh

too much for us

in the end. We

take a picture

and leave. They snort

and whinny, their

bodies’ poised for

flight. The horses

of poetry

gleam in our mind’s

hollow, the wind

of humankind

in their nostrils.

~ Anna Quon

Anna Quon lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. She writes with compassion and ferocity about the struggle to grow up without a tribe of one's own. Drawing on her own experience as a half-Chinese- Canadian raised on Canada''s East Coast, and her own ambivalence about belonging, Migration Songs is Quon''s first novel.