A Colt's recollection of Palm Sunday

A Colt, The Foal of an Ass

by Robert Siegel

"Contemplating the dust he stands

in the direct unbearable noon, tethered

to the dead thorn. His long ears hang

down, twitch and revolve as the gang of flies

brassily land and bite and ascend

in a constant small black cloud. His hide

at each bite quivers and smooths out

like this earthquake-tormented land,

while his tail, with its bathrobe tassel, larrups

and swats too late.

His eyes, half-lidded

in the bleaching light, are fixed and still,

his plain, dull face perpendicular as a post,

his forelock hanging over it.

He does not

turn toward the stranger who stands talking

with the two at the door. Only his muzzle,

soft as silk and still faintly pink,

twitches as his nostrils catch the foreign scent,

widen, and lift his lip for half a second.

Then

lazily he turns to look, eyes glazed, indifferent,

tugs at the harsh rope once, desists,

patient with donkey patience, already learning

the rough discipline that pulled him from the grass

and his mother's side.

Now, without warning,

as if he feels a tremor underfoot,

some inaudible alarm from the world's core,

he bares his teeth and breaks the air with a sound

like a stone wrenched and crying from its center,

harsh and grating as a rusty hinge

on which the whole earth hangs.

Later

there is a moment with a crowd roaring

in surges long and hoarse as breakers crashing,

cool, green branches to tread over the hot stones,

and flowers which offer a brief fragrance underhoof -

one moment of all those in the years that are to come

of fetching and hauling for masters bad and good,

when he does not mind what he is carrying,

when a sense of joy returns, the early smell

of grass while he first stood, unsteady, in the field

with a beast's dim sense of liberty.

Still, he cannot guess what he is carrying

and will not remember this moment in all the years

until he is worn out, lame,

until the hammer is brought down on his unsuspecting head,

his hooves melted to glue, his hide thrown to the crows -

when he shall return to this now, this always,

he continues to live in,

this moment of bearing the man,

a weight that is light and easy,

celebrated in a rough, ecstatic chorus,

toward his own fatal burden heavier than the world."

taken from A Pentecost of Finches, New & Selected Poems
by Robert Siegel, Paraclete Press, Copyright 2006