The Horses

I climbed through the woods in the hour before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness.

Not a leaf, not a bird -
A world cast in frost, I came out above the wood

Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light,
But in the valleys were draining the darkness

Till the moorline - blackening dregs of the brightening
grey -
Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses.

Huge in the dense grey - ten together -
Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,

With draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making no sound.

I passed: not one snorted or jerked his head.
Grey silent fragments

Of a grey world.

I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.
The curfew’s tear turned its edge on the silence.

Slowly detail I leafed from the darkness. Then the sun,
Orange, red, red erupted.

Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,
Shook the gulf open, showered blue,

And the big planets hanging -
I turned

Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards
The dark woods, from the kindling tops,

And came to the horses.
They still they stood.

But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light,

Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves
Stirring under a thaw while all around them

The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.
Not one snorted and stamped.

Their hung heads patient as the horizons,
High over valleys, in the red levelling rays -

In the din of the crowded streets, going among the
Years, the faces,
May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place

Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing curfews,
Hearing the horizons endure.

Ted Hughes