Horse skeleton (as requested)!

Hail to the time survivor,
weather-scoured architecture,
once thunder on the hoof, now a stark white
lecturer
on stillness profound.

Your skull, a hollowed gourd where sunbeams pool
and shadows lengthen, playing the fool
with shapes of life, eye sockets vacant, staring past the cool
wind that whistles through your ribs, a brittle cage
that held a lunging heart, turned history’s forgotten page.
Echoes sleep.

Bleached calcium jigsaw puzzle,
vertebrae like ancient, heavy beads strung on nothing visible,
the memory of muscle, sinew’s raw, insistent
pull, all dissolved back to elemental.
Only this framework, resolved
to stand, or lie, a stark testament
under the vast sky.

The fine grass pushes through your delicate pastern bones,
indifferent green reclaiming ground,
heedless of whinnies or the pounding sounds
your hooves once made. Now only the low moans
of air moving across plains unseen
by eyes long since gone blind.
Dawn
finds you patient, resigned.

A map of what was speed,
what was fluid grace and urgent need,
reduced to this strange geometry against the patient dust.
A lesson in rust
and returning. Trust
the earth’s slow claim, the final name
whispered only by wind and steady rain, perhaps.
Gone the flesh, the living fire, the synaptic traps
of conscious breath.
Only bone, defiant in death.