Maxine Kumin, 1925-2014

Maxine Kumin’s poetry, rich in horses, has always been dear to me. Here, from her 1978 book, The Retrieval System, is her poem, “Late Snow”:

LATE SNOW

It’s frail, this spring snow, it’s pot cheese
packing down underfoot. It flies out of the trees
at sunrise like a flock of migrant birds.
It slips in clumps off the barn roof,
wingless angels dropped by parachute.
Inside, I hear the horses knocking
aimlessly in their warm brown lockup,
as the soul must, confined under the breastbone.
Horses blowing their noses, coming awake,
shaking the sawdust bedding out of their coats.
They do not know what has fallen
out of the sky, colder than apple bloom,
since last night’s hay and oats.
They do not know how satisfactory
they look, set loose in the April sun,
nor what handsprings are turned under
my ribs with winter gone.

-Maxine Kumin

A beautiful, brown horses in the farm during the sunrise. Rural morning scenery of Northern Europe with farm animals.