Excerpt of "A Poem about Blackboy’s Horse" by Bertrand Bickersteth

Boy’s horse stepped in a badger’s hole, lost her footing

and fell. Boy was flipped

 

in the air. His foot caught in the stirrup. He felt a pain

shoot through his ankle,

 

felt the inertia of his flight take over the topography, twist

westerly, still tilting to the east.

 

His body was a loose spigot pivoting around the fulcrum

of a meaningless ankle.

 

He felt his fingers slipping through her withers, felt the fear

of the horse rushing to the ground

 

above him. He couldn’t stop any of it. Couldn’t stop himself

from imagining the unknowable

 

impact or the whistle of weight to follow. He knew what was

coming. He knew the soil

 

he was headed for. Knew its knowledge. The chemistry of

its creativity: mildly gleysolic

 

chernozem, churning life and his livelihood as he knew it.

Knew it, too, as foreign, as far

 

from familiar as he was from family. He tried to imagine a family

but their image burst into the falling

 

air before him, before fading, as always, into the darkness

of dirt. Then came the weight

 

of sadness and the piercing pain of the forgone, unmentioned,

unmurmured, like that flash of green,

 

that patch of wild timothy whose individual blades know nothing

of their shared past,

 

know nothing of their sibling entanglement, nothing at all

of their intertwined roots

 

whose domain is the catacombs beneath the crust, whose action

is downward groping, like fingers of ancestry,

 

a blind quest in the sorrow of soil, forever fumbling, forever finicking

for the unknowable mother of darkness.

 

is the author of The Response of Weeds. His poetry has appeared in numerous publications including Geist, The Walrus, and Grain. He is currently working on a collection of poems on Black cowboys. He lives in Moh’kins’tsis (Calgary) and teaches at Olds College, both in Treaty 7 Territory.