Parable

Katherine Lamb

“What does a horse do / with a beautiful broken / neck?”
 -Maram Al-Massari

It doesn’t eat
out of your hand anymore. It doesn’t 
slip sweetly into a standing sleep.
It spits up
and we have to start again. It dreams 
of a thousand bees in the field 
where it is not roaming. It dreams 
of sweet honey water, 
so we do our best. We try 
to get the mixture right.
In the end, it’s never right 
and we have to apologize. We have to 
soak pears and oranges and apples
in water, and we have to
pretend this is the same as honey.
But its tongue is a loose, broken machine,
slipping in and out, frustrated 
by its mistakes and the honey 
that spills on the ground.
It watches us cry. It watches us 
cry and doesn’t understand 
why we’d waste the water.
It wants to crack 
open sugar cubes in its field mouth, and so do I.
It wants to see a dense, green lake
but only if we lead it in 
sweetly. It turns the idea over 
in its head like a heavy rock
in a bright, clean field.
It wants to be back 
in a field, even just to sit.
It wants to be lifted
and spun in the wind 
like those happily lost seeds with the wings,
which it used to pluck from the air
with its mouth. It wants to be carried 
by a bee, carried a hundred miles
and poured over an unfamiliar field.
It wants to be given 
to others, to supply other bodies, to be wiped
happily from a greedy mouth.
It wants to do better than we have done.