White Horses
If we could choose,
I think we’d want white horses.
They look good in light,
tearing green around their feet
not looking up, not minding us.
We’d want them going fast enough
to get us past the obvious,
despite their breath pushed hard
around the bit we wish we didn’t need
to get us out of here.
Turning easy at our hands, of course
caparisoned, smooth-gaited, bearing us
with cadenced grace through bands of rain
and any lines arrayed against us, straight ahead,
even over fields of broken flowers.
They might come if we call,
if we choose the purity
of running things gone wild,
if we will keep watch on the dark horizon,
empty halters in our hands.
Roberta Senechal de la Roche is an American historian, sociologist, and poet of Micmac and French Canadian descent, and was born in western Maine. She now lives in the woods outside of Charlottesville near the Blue Ridge Mountains. She graduated from the University of Southern Maine and the University of Virginia, and is Professor of History at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. Her poems have appeared in the Colorado Review; Literary Juice; Still: The Journal; the Front Porch Review; Glass: A Journal of Poetry; Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review; Yemassee; Cold Mountain Review, and the Big River Review, among others. Her poems also were selected for and published in the 2011 and 2015 Montreal International Poetry Prize Longlist, and her chapbook, Blind Flowers, won the 2016 Arcadia Press Chapbook Prize.