Literacy – A Poem by Marie MacSweeney
We are thoughtful. We shoe horses
so that they leave traces
along a shimmering collage
of fractured shells.
In hard-packed sand
their footprints are comma deep.
We are helpful. We shoe horses
and their feet
etch alphabets
in looser sand,
almost literate to a depth
of three inches.
We are engrossed, infer stories
as they enter water,
seaweed shackling
their hooves,
aquatic censorship,
though we see no traces,
and when they run free,
hock-high in foamy waves,
the garrulous surge of sea
added to theirs
make sagas,
scholarly tomes.
Observing them, we long
to scribble narratives
in lost planets,
galactic clusters,
probing deep space
with the point of our pen.
More at http://mariemacsweeney.com.
