Koşuk of the Konik, a poem by Alistair Noon

The koniks don’t neigh but skitter and dodge
across the reclaimed sewage park,
their part of the sand’s post-glacial splodge
our ancestors mapped as the Brandenburg Mark,

a wire-ringed paddock we've left these guys,
who stand aloof as the ninja flies
land on their feet, their black disguise
nothing for horses’ eyes to mark.

Although their skins are tones of grey,
one’s chromosomes came out all bay,
but muted shades will still convey
mutated grace as well as Franz Marc.

Rainclouds resemble their sagging paunches:
a signal out of their genome launches
pale lightning down their well-honed haunches
to give the koniks their common birthmark.

They look as if they’ve just concurred,
one homely and harmonious herd
unbothered by the fall of a merd
to earth that reels of steel wire mark,

quite unlike Rilke's bar-gazing panther,
or keepers shut in with a Leopard panzer:
they seem to be more of a coelcanth, a
pebble let go at the tidal mark.

The paddock does without a padlock:
the konik needs no clothes or clock,
just grass and a trough. The fence is a shock,
a neural scar its defining mark.

This world is small, so why think big?
Under its solemn black legal wig,
the equine head will study a twig
and leave a meticulous dental mark.

***

Alistair Noon's poetry collections include Earth Records (2012) and The Kerosene Singing (2015), both from Nine Arches Press. Concert at a Railway Station (2018), his translations of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, was reviewed in the TLS. ‘Translocal Underground’, a short film about him by filmmaker Paul Cooke, appeared in 2018. He's lived in Berlin since the early 90s.