The Friday Poem: The riderless horses by Tim Upperton
(Image: Pixabay)
A new prose poem by Palmerston North poet Tim Upperton.
The riderless horses
One evening that summer a riderless horse galloped along our road, empty stirrups slapping. We ran up the driveway screaming to our mother. Quick, inside! she said. She shut and locked the door, closed the windows. The horse tried the door handle, its large eye pressed to the keyhole. It prowled around the house, the fume of its breath misting the windows. It couldn’t get in! We laughed with relief. My brother remembers it differently, when I call him up, but we agree on the rattle of the door handle. Stupid Mum! I say to the dog. He chews on a dried pig’s ear – I bought him a packet of them at the supermarket. Boy loves to chew. I pull another ear from the packet and whisper into it, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but it’s heard it all before. It’s getting late. I hear the sound of hooves, and from every direction the riderless horses come.
Tim Upperton
Tim Upperton is the author of the poetry collections A House on Fire (2009) and The Night We Ate the Baby (2014). His poems have been published widely in literary magazines in New Zealand and overseas, and are anthologised in The Best of Best New Zealand Poems (2011), Villanelles (2012), Essential New Zealand Poems (2014), and Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century (2014). He was born in Waipukurau in 1961.
