The Truth About Flying Horses Poem by Paul Hartal

Do you remember the fairy tale about
the levitating steed over the deserts of Arabia,
the story of the enchanted flying horse
in the One Thousand and One Nights?

Anyhow, my dear reader, you probably
do not believe in fairy tales. Do you?
Levitating steeds and flying horses? You say.
Nevertheless, you may rest assured, horses
really can fly, at least for a short time.

Artists in the past used to paint a horse
at a trot with one foot on the ground.
And in depicting full equine gallop they placed
the front legs extended forward and the hind
legs extended to the rear, yet all still touching
the ground.

However, the fact is that the human eye
cannot perceive precisely the fast motion
of a horse at full gallop. So the answer
to the thorny puzzle of whether or not
trotting and galloping horses kept their legs
above the ground, or in touch with the earth,
came from the pioneering photographic
studies of motion by Eadweard Muybridge.

In the 1870s Muybridge settled this problem
by recording the quick gaits of a galloping horse
in a series of photographs, showing clearly
all its feet off the ground and its legs
collected under its body. Muybridge proved
that a fast moving horse defies gravity,
it is periodically airborne and momentarily
hovers above the ground.