A Dream of Horses

We were born grooms, in stable-straw we sleep still,

All our wealth horse-dung and the combings of horses,

And all we can talk about is what horses ail.

Out of the night that gulfed beyond the palace-gate

There shook hooves and hooves and hooves of horses:

Our horses battered their stalls; their eyes jerked white.

And we ran out, mice in our pockets and straw in our hair,

Into darkness that was avalanching to horses

And a quake of hooves. Our lantern’s little orange flare

Made a round mask of our each sleep-dazed face,

Bodiless, or else bodied by horses

That whinnied and bit and cannoned the world from its place.

The tall palace was so white, the moon was so round,

Everything else this plunging of horses

To the rim of our eyes that strove for the shapes of the sound.

We crouched at our lantern, our bodies drank the din,

And we longed for a death trampled by such horses

As every grain of the earth had hooves and mane.

We must have fallen like drunkards into a dream

Of listening, lulled by the thunder of the horses.

We awoke stiff; broad day had come.

Out through the gate unprinted desert stretched

To stone and scorpion; our stable-horses

Lay in their straw, in a hag-sweat, listless and wretched.

Now let us, tied, be quartered by these poor horses,

If but doomsday’s flames be great horses,

The forever itself a circling of the hooves of horses.

 Writer: Ted Hughes