POEM
The Horse
for Ichiro Kawamoto, humanitarian, electrician, & survivor of Hiroshima
They spoke of the horse alive
without skin, naked, hairless,
without eyes and ears, searching
for the stableboy’s caress.
Shoot it, someone said, but they
let him go on colliding with
tattered walls, butting his long
skull to pulp, finding no path
where iron fences corkscrewed in
the street and bicycles turned
like question marks.
Some fled and
some sat down. The river burned
all that day and into the
night, the stones sighed a moment
and were still, and the shadow
of a man’s hand entered
a leaf.
The white horse never
returned, and later they found
the stable boy, his back crushed
by a hoof, his mouth opened
around a cry that no one heard.
They spoke of the horse again
and again; their mouths opened
like the gills of a fish caught
above water.
Mountain flowers
burst from the red clay walls, and
they said a new life was here.
Raw grass sprouted from the cobbles
like hair from a deafened ear.
The horse would never return.
There had been no horse. I could
tell from the way they walked
testing the ground for some cold
that the rage had gone out of
their bones in one mad dance.
Philip Levine, “The Horse” from New Selected Poems. Copyright © 1991 by Philip Levine. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
Source: Poetry (June 1963).
This poem originally appeared in the June 1963 issue of Poetry.
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