MARSH TACKIES

Browsing on the salty marsh grass,

Barrel-ribbed and blowsy-bellied,

With a neigh as shrill as whistles

And their mouths red-raw from thistles,

I have seen the brown marsh tackies,

Hiding in the swamps at Kiawah,

With the gray mosquito patches

Gory on their shaggy thatches.

Balky, vicious, and degenerates,

They are small as Spanish jennets,

But their sires were with El Tarab,

When he conquered Andalusia

For the Prophet and the Arab;

And they came with Ponce de Leon,

When the Spaniard made a peon

And a Christian of the Carib.

Peering from palmetto thickets

At some fort's coquina wickets,

Startled Indians saw them grazing,

Thunder-stamping and amazing

As the beasts from other stars,

When they galloped down savannas,

And their masters seemed centaurs

With the new white metal blazing.

Thus they came, these little beasts,

With the men-at-arms and priests,

In the west with Coronado

When he reached the Colorado,

In the east with bold De Soto

In the search for El Dorado,

And they packed the bells and toys

That the chieftains loved like boys;

Struggling through the swamps and briars

After dons and tonsured friars;

Dying in the forests dismal,

Till the shrill of silver clarion

Brought the buzzards to the carrion

Round the smoke of lonely fires

In a continent abysmal.

So De Soto left them dying,

Heedless of their human crying;

Here he turned them loose to die

Underneath a foreign sky;

But they lived on thicket dross,

On the leaves and Spanish moss —

And I wonder, and I wonder,

When I hear the startled thunder

Of their hoofs die down the reaches

Of these Carolina beaches.