Cindy Botha

down horse

we find the bay mare where she fell
shocked and spent
an impossible shape in the grey morning
sodden as laundry
no hope of rising from the slick
of freezing mud that took her down
the listing flank
useless sideways hooves

and one dark loved eye
watching us, the upright onlookers
asking nothing
our fists in her mane, faces sunk
in the valley of her neck
as if we might follow where she’s going
she grunts not like a mare
but one imitating a mare, or is it us

afraid, like Ocyrrhoe
of the sound from our own mouths
we flinch from the weight
of failure
vow to sleep standing up
it’s raining again, the sky like cold fat
and it’s easy to imagine
the end of the world

Cindy Botha was born and raised in Africa and now lives in New Zealand. She began writing while caring for her mother, a dementia sufferer. Her poems appear in magazines and anthologies in NZ, Australia, the UK and USA.

Cindy wrote the following about her poem:

In writing a poem, I like to access something that I didn’t know was going to be in the poem when I started out, another layer if you like, which hopefully deepens and extends the narrative. This piece began as a description of a personal event, but the impossibility of articulating that grief brought to mind the story of Ocyrrhoe, which in turn opened a door to the way despair can feel ‒ in the moment ‒ not only unutterable but un-survivable.