‘Sea Horse’
Irakli Mirzashvili grew up in a family of visual artists in Tbilisi, country of Georgia, and enjoys working in oil pastels, creating collages, and photography. His artwork has been exhibited in the United States and Georgia. After living in rural Alaska, the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and the great plains of Kansas, Irakli resides in the Austin, Texas, area.
Sea Horse
“Analysis of the DNA [of a 16th century Puerto Rican horse tooth] suggests that old folk tales claiming that horses were marooned on Assateague following the shipwreck of a Spanish galleon are likely more fact than fiction.” Science Daily, July 27, 2022.
I arose with the squat rouge heart
of the newbirthed sun and saw
on the shore the filly - pale,
riderless, feral horse
in shoaling waves, hooves planted
in wet sand like gifts from old ships.
The stout legs of the young pinto
straddled chasms in time’s beat
as pier pilings stand
in every unique spasmic pulse
of wavelets’ wash, gnawed
each moment by the endless teeth
of curled surf, riptides and salt spray.
Her vigor seemed boundless,
the big bones under taut hide,
her rich brown and white
splotched coat, the easy ebb
and swell of lungs under ribs,
her neck vein’s steady stroke,
the scalloped weave of wind
and winding waves in her mane,
the sharp twitch of her winglike ears,
her attentive stare down
cheekbone to disdainful nostrils.
Then I saw her sufferings -
withers slightly dotted
by rainrot, a fistula
of ringworm on the back,
a hidden tinge of hoof thrush.
The tail that swatted
galaxies of flies, a razored army
grazing from haunch to muzzle
when she foraged these swamps
of Assateague Island, now lay
like a damp column of ivory
skirting the sea foam. Still,
her eyes contained a cosmos
of seas within – a remembrance
of centuries of arhythmic ravage
and caress by waves on coast,
a long chain of gales,
battered gulls and terns,
storm and dampening fog,
days like this of sunlight
mirrored on mica sea,
or of her forebears as they swam
from Spanish wreckage
through granite surf to dire shore.
The soft thunder of the demons
of ancestral memory made
her gentle and indominable.
What is the wave that swells
in our core with each breath
to meet all incoming tides?
When they collide we can hear
how the backwash murmurs
this ocean’s heart sound.
Like the heart of this horse,
the sea will pound like this
always, and never again.
G.R. Kramer, a Virginian nearing old age, has been writing poetry for publication for the past decade. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Oberon, Palette Poetry, Red Wheelbarrow and Winter Anthology, among other places. His chapbook, Locomotive of Mangled Parts, is available from Finish Line Press. Go to grkramerpoetry.substack.com for more, or contact him at blueguitar58@gmail.com.
