Horse and Tree
Everybody who’s anybody longs to be a tree—
or ride one, hair blown to froth.
That’s why horses were invented, and saddles
tooled with singular stars.
This is why we braid their harsh manes
as if they were children, why children
might fear a carousel at first for the way
it insists that life is round. No,
we reply, there is music and then it stops;
the beautiful is always rising and falling.
We call and the children sing back one more time.
In the tree the luminous sap ascends.
This poem is excerpted from The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace & Renewal (Storey Publishing, 2023), edited by James Crews, a collection of highly accessible, uplifting poetry celebrating the small wonders and peaceful moments of everyday life.
This is the first of five poems from the anthology reprinted in Terrain.org over the second week of October 2023. As an introduction to the poems, read James Crews’s “The Wonder of Small Things”.
“Horse and Tree” by Rita Dove, from Grace Notes. Copyright © 1989 by Rita Dove. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Rita Dove published her first book of poems, The Yellow House on the Corner, in 1980. She has followed this work with several other collections, including Museum, Thomas and Beulah, Grace Notes, Selected Poems, Mother Love, On the Bus with Rosa Parks, and American Smooth. In 1993, Dove became Poet Laureate of the United States, the first Black poet to receive this honor.
Header photo by 44833, courtesy Pixabay. Photo of Rita Dove courtesy of Rita Dove and the Poetry Foundation.
