by Horia Alexandru Pop
Finding You In a Late Field & Other Small Mercies
When soft and stampede appear in the same sentence,
there’s expectation of loss. Of what could flourish.
We claim it is dappled, even without seeing the hooves.
We want to name the creature — the cause of dust rising.
In a week, maybe prayer or a sense of singing,
but today, we plant ourselves whole in heavy turf.
I could point to the glades where they happily grazed.
Blame the startled mare, or the incidental shotgun.
And the foals, looking up only to taste the rain
as it arrives without a siren. No apparent casualties.
But how we obsess to save the foal,
two eyes peering through a shower of slow bullets.
Because each droplet means more when in love.
The rivers shiver their way through a dry spell.
A field effervesces as if finding us in its fragrance,
lightning golds the sharp V of migratory geese.
We are looking up too, at where language failed.
Our tongues outstretched to this rare syrup.
The season says: strip off your layers.
Lie down, let the deep cold run its course.
Soon, the wordless music of snow, empty of my footfalls.
The blankest score of pale meadow-frost.
Fog, breath, sheer manes — streaming
a ritual blurring towards the next joy.
Some small mercy unplugging the sun,
so we can hide a little longer, inside this great game,
Vikki C. is an award-nominated writer and author of The Art of Glass Houses (Alien Buddha Press) & Where Sands Run Finest (DarkWinter Press). Her work appears internationally in venues such as Psaltery & Lyre, The Inflectionist Review, EcoTheo Review, Emerge Literary Journal, Stone Circle Review, Sweet Literary, Harpy Hybrid Review, Amethyst Review, Dust Poetry Magazine, Ice Floe Press, Ballast Journal, New Verse Review, Cable Street, One Hand Clapping, Acropolis Journal, The Belfast Review, New Feathers Anthology, Boats Against The Current, ONE ART Poetry, The Hyacinth Review, Black Bough Poetry, DarkWinter Lit, The Winged Moon and The Broken Spine, among others. Vikki’s writing has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and the Orison Best Spiritual Literature.
Twitter/X: @VWC_Writes Bluesky: vikkicwrites.bsky.social Linktree: linktr.ee/vikki_c._author.
Horia Alexandru Pop was born in Romania in 1984. He is an artist living in France. His works include poetry, short stories, plays, movie scripts, short films and photography. His next step is to find a producer for his road movie script “Samuel Kramer or the Adventurous life of a Tramp.”