Snow Ponies

[Zondrae]

I wrote this one for the Dalgety Festival 2010. Awarded a Commmended.
there was also a section for poems on the theme of 'Horse Power'. The second poem was my other effort.


Snow Ponies
© Zondrae King (Corrimal) 08/10

On early, frosty mornings at about the start of spring
the foals are born into this world of woe.
Their mothers tend them lovingly. Their father keeps the watch
until their legs are strong enough to go.

The mares are lighter muscled but still show their solid stock.
The stallions choose the best to run beside.
They are the ones, these ponies, that have been immortalised
when telling stories of that mountain ride.

For men will come to claim them. Round them up and drive them down
and break them to the saddle and the rein.
But never will they tame the spirit of the mountain bred,
those born to run in snow, on steep terrain.

Their coats are rough and wiry, their hooves are tough as flint.
Their bodies may be tamed but not their wills.
For, though they may be ridden, they are wild at the core
with half a chance they head back to the hills.

If captured, while still young, these ponies work until they drop.
Their feet accustom to the rough terrain.
Those ponies, full of spirit, bear the legend of a ride
embedded from the tail to the mane.

In winter, snow that falls so gently on the distant hills,
can muffle sounds of ponies as they rise.
They shuffle round each other then they whinny and they snort
and echoes bounce from mountain top to skies.

Some people say these horses should be driven from the hills
to leave the mountains as they were before.
The Brumbies who were brought by man, destroy the native bush
but time itself brings change and sometimes more.

Remove the Brumbies from the hills, if this is what we wish,
but legends of the horses will run free.
and in the Snowy mountains, still the brumby spirit runs
in dreams, if not in our reality.


It is an attempt at a different rhythm. I think I rushed it and slipped up here and there.
Horse Power

©Zondrae King (Corrimal) 10/10

The mountains and valleys all echoed, back then, with the sound of the masters whip
as great teams of horses were hauling the wool from the farm to the waiting ship.
The distances vast from the sheep to the coast, for the horse, dusty, long and hard
and many's the horse that was broken and worn out and left in the knackery yard.

The days were so long in the hot Summer months and the work there could break your back.
The wife of the squatter saw easier days than the folks living on the track.
This country survived on the mobs of Merinos that grazed on the inland planes,
The mills of old England cried out for the fleeces. A legacy still remains.

But tracks that stretch back from the shearer to ship yard were both long and hardly won
and horses that hauled thrice their weight in their loads, laboured hard in the midday sun.
The captains of boats on the Darling and Murray, where great paddle wheelers would wait
gave little time thinking about straining horses - no care for their dire state.

Those Shires and Clydesdales, so proud and so willing, each foot like a dinner plate
and muscles that stretched like a taut steel rope, pulling wagons, as was their fate.
The flys bred in millions to torment their eyes while some others would itch or nip
and if they grew weary and needed a nudge they would then feel the sting of the whip.

But time brings it’s changes, as well we all know, and the horses have had their day.
Our wool makes it’s the journey all over the world but no longer by horse and dray.
Its engines of diesel that power the trucks and the road trains from way out west
and fumes hang around, all the folks in the town, like the scent of an unwelcome guest .

Today when they muster it’s all helicopters and motor bikes on the farm
and though you may not see a man on a horse, there is no need to raise an alarm.
There’s stations as big as some countries of Europe where modern procedures are go.
But mobs grow much smaller, there’s never much water and numbers of ships are low.

When gathered at sundown, in pubs or in homesteads, when telling of days gone by
they talk of the tallies of champion shearers or times when the prices were high.
They long for the feel of a saddle when riding the fences hour by hour.
And when they talk ‘strength of an engine’, of course, they will still use the term, ‘horse power’.


(I think I like the second one better)

[r.magnay]

...pretty good for a sheila who regularly gets accused of being an anti horse person!...show 'em Zondrae!

[Maureen K Clifford]

Reckon they are both beaut Zondrae - might post one of my Horsey ones as well since we seem to be galloping along at the moment.

Cheers

Maureen

[Kym]

I liked 'em both Zondrae and I'm very proud of you for going into the world of horses, albeit a virtual world. I know people who have brumbies for saddle horses and you'd never pick them. They look just like normal horses! And some properties do still muster with horses. They say it keeps the cattle calmer and meat tenderer.

I'll post photo of a cattle drive I watched recently - they had to swim across the ocean.

See ya',

K.

[r.magnay]

...well I'll be buggered! maybe all those normal horses I see running around in the bush here are brumbies!...I didn't realise there was a difference between normal horses and brumbies...now I am confused.....

[Kym]

I guess it was bit of a blonde comment Ross, but when I replied to Zondrae, I was imagining the "brumby" I saw being ridden at the show. It was all tizzied up with ribbons and sparkles and lookin' pretty schmick - not what brumbies normally look like. We (I) tend to glorify them in poems, but the ones I've seen in the bush were quite scraggly and scruffy looking. My ponies are looking pretty feral at the moment too, but once they've had a good scrub-up they come up looking like real horses again!

[Zondrae]

G'day Kym,
When we went to Fraser Island a few years back, we were greeted one morning by a horse poking it'd head in the back door. They were tame enough to take food from your hand but I wouldn't trust them too much. They were fairly shaggy as it was spring and I thought they may be shedding the winter coat. If that is what horses do.