Each month, we publish an original poem, written in response to a work of contemporary art. This month, poet Ralf Webb chose the film With Horses (2023) by Maeve Brennan.
Synthetic litter shimmers in the harsh sunlight; green shoots punctuate the otherwise dusty plain. A foal takes its first steps among crumpled bottles and synthetic blue bags. The camera focus is still, sharp, unforgiving. The British artist Maeve Brennan’s short film, situated in a landfill site in Burkina Faso, depicts this foal’s experience in tandem with a horse’s last breaths – side by side among the plains of plastic waste. As a filmmaker and researcher, Brennan has made a career out of slowness, steady study, mining the gradualness of the world. No more so than here, eking out on camera each second of two lives against the accumulation of waste that is the life’s work of us all.
Two Horses
after Maeve Brennan
In the field by my house as a child
Were two horses. It was a narrow field,
Fenced-off, margined by brambles
And a pitted grass track despoiled
By dog waste, plastic bags, tin cans
(A footpath my dad called Shit Valley)
And where once as a child I found
A condom on a twig in the hedgerow
Yellow froth pooled in its drooping nipple
Like a chrysalis cradling a pupa.
The two horses, I was told, were happy.
In my bedroom at night as a child
I heard hoofbeats echo in a storm
A rain-tide of muscle and leather
Pummelling the waterlogged earth.
I was told, by my sister, horses go loco
In weird weather. And did I know
The bottommost bone in a horse’s leg
(Encased, like a corpse, in keratin)
Is called coffin? Girls, I thought, understand
The attitudes of animals in motion.
Girls could reveal the nature of happy horses.
One winter in the garden as a child
I trampled on a slab of polystyrene
Creating pellets of artificial snow
Which whirled around my head
Like a perfect dream of Christmas.
One summer, one horse attacked the other.
I gathered my family to watch
The mad horse leave in a tall thin box
While the other, torn open, tipped over.
We waited for something to happen.
We were waiting for an explanation.
Ralf Webb is the author of the poetry collections Highway Cottage and Rotten Days in Late Summer, as well as the nonfiction book Strange Relations: Masculinity, Sexuality and Art in Midcentury America.
