An Afternoon Of Horns Poem by Richard Blanch

Unfurling the mind’s filaments feels good-
Freeing them, letting grass-green and wind
Shred them over the fields,
The hills, the cows, the undulant woods,
The silence. Not trying to find
Anything, not waiting, lining the breeze.

Lowing, brown sound, comes from behind a hedge
Soothing the last wrinkles out of the air….
Till volume and pitch rise – a crescendo
Of anxiety. Past the style I see them-
Calves. A roar now, approaching fast- there
Are so many, running at me as though

They needed. Curious, leaping, eyes
Liquid and large beyond the scope of lakes.
Sweet ungulates. Along the placid slope
Their mothers graze unconcerned. The rise
And rise of sawing sound shakes
Me. These young lives are male.

They will never grow. Slaughterhouse stuff.
Seeing what is known already scythes
Through the stalk of the mind and makes dull,
Darkens a shining day. Walk away.. The rough
Sound dies. A clear and icy calm lies
Down on warm sunset paths. Prospects, full

And sunlit open again. But those deaths
To come hang about like bloody cobwebs. Down
The red road towards home, then, the only sound
My footsteps and thoughts. Suddenly, ahead
A halt. Picking a moment, soft and round,
Out of the fading afternoon, bound

Two small and velvet wild ones from the wood,
Brown and gold as the evening, little heads
Poised, curious. Again a swimming gaze
Fixes on mine. Deer. Aptly named. But these could,
Unfenced, take their leave. Nervously alert, they fled,
Unhurried, off our road, into their shade.