I Found My Horse

I found my horse with its back to the street,
Neat and quite discreet.
One eye winking toward the sea,
There it sheltered me.
High on my perch in the old birch tree,
I can watch the summer-folk stroll along,
And sleep with the pounding surf-cliff song.
Oh, Sea! Lick your sand endlessly!
Lash at the rocks with foam!
Landlocked dry on the cliff am I,
Where the gas lamp glows on my step ‘til morn,
I’ve found my haven from stress and storm.
(1930s)

This sounds like it was written during the time the family lived on the rocky North Shore of Boston, just blocks from the ocean, or farther in town in Somerville. The nature images here are central to mom’s thinking and the theme of finding a haven from stress is a key to her personality, her ability to take things in stride, to find calm and stay steady in the midst of crisis and chaos and uncertainty. The horse, birch tree and cliff are all sheltering, intertwined concrete images symbolizing her “haven from stress,” the actual abstract emotion she is feeling. They are also images and memries from her childhood on the farm on the Minnesota prarie. This use of imagery and repetition shows a fairly sophisticated, conscious sense of poetic style and technique. It is not just a casual blurting down of words and ideas. She is “landlocked dry on the cliff…where the gas lamp glows on my step til morn.” Could this be the house on the hill the family moved into in 1936 in Somerville that overlooked parts of Boston, or the second- and third-floor home they moved into in 1940 to be closer to St. Catherine’s Catholic school? While there is no sure way to accurately identify the source and inspiration and meaning of the imagery of this poem (or most of mom’s poems), the poem stands on its own as a coherent piece of poetic sentiment. Mom’s imagination could easily turn a bedroom window high on a hill into a “cliff” or a “perch in an old birch tree.” Her love of the sea, of its power and majesty, is clearly captured here in words, as she personifies it, makes it a living companion: "Oh, Sea! Lick your sand endlessly! Lash at the rocks with foam!" This sense of the wonder and awe of nature, this deep appreciation of and closeness to it, was an essential and daily part of mom's life, even to her very last day as she marveled at the roses all around her and the eucalyptus branches waving high above against a backdrop of deep blue sky. To her very last moments, she was totally attuned to, connected to, resonating with the natural world around her.