Celebration: Birth of a Colt

Linda Hogan is a Chickasaw poet, novelist and essayist. She is the author of several books of poetry and a collection of short fiction. Her novel MEAN SPIRIT, published by Atheneum, received the Oklahoma Book Award for fiction in 1990 and the Mountain & Plains Bookseller's Association Fiction Award.

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When we reach the field
she is still eating
the heads of yellow flowers
and pollen has turned her whiskers
gold. Lady,
her stomach bulges out,
the ribs have grown wide.
We wait,
our bare feet dangling
in the horse trough,
warm water
where goldfish brush
our smooth ankles.
We wait
while the liquid breaks
down Lady's dark legs
and that slick wet colt
like a black tadpole
darts out
beginning at once
to sprout legs.
She licks it to its feet,
the membrane still there,
red, transparent
the sun coming up shines through,
the sky turns bright with morning
and the land
with pollen blowing off the corn,
land that will always own us,
everywhere it is red.

"Celebration: Birth of a Colt" by Linda Hogan, from Red Clay. © The Greenfield Review Press, 1991.