Hoofprints: Horse Poems
By Jessie Haas
3/5
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About this ebook
“We have all been changed by the horse, for better and worse.” —Jessie Haas
Jessie Haas travels back sixty-five million years—from 5000 BCE to the present day—in 104 poems about our equine friends.
Horses have shared some of the most significant moments in human history. In these lyrical and poignant pieces—some written from the horse’s point of view—readers will meet chariot racers, knights’ steeds, horse whisperers, even Pegasus, the winged horse. In one moving poem, a compassionate colt befriends a lonely man; in another, a starving soldier shares a meal with his mount. Whether it’s the thundering herd of Genghis Khan or a Dutch farmer shielding his horse from the Nazis, these transportive free-verse poems reveal how horses have influenced and enriched our lives. Hoofprints is an awe-inspiring journey through history as we gallop alongside horse and rider and experience “the mid-air moment” when “everything may yet / turn out all right.”
This ebook includes a bibliography and a glossary of equine terminology.
Jessie Haas
Jessie Haas is the author of numerous acclaimed books for young people, including Unbroken, which was a Publishers Weekly Best Book, a School Library Journal Best Book, a Parent's Choice Gold Award winner, a Notable Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies, and CCBC Choice. Her most recent novel, Shaper, won a Golden Kite Honor Award.
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Book preview
Hoofprints - Jessie Haas
Introduction
I love reading about alternative medicine, for horses as well as for people, and in Healing Your Horse I learned something fascinating about acupuncture.
Chi, the essential force acupuncturists work with, runs through the body in pathways called meridians, which are similar in all mammals. But an acupuncturist working on horses can’t use meridians below the knee and hock. Sixty million years ago the horse had toes. Now it has a single hoof. The toes remain, tiny irrelevant bones concealed in the long slim column of the leg. The meridians have been concealed as well, squeezed and distorted. Close to the ground, the acupuncture points on a modern horse seem random.
Like those toes, like chi itself, hidden truths underlie the horse stories I grew up on—the ones that were supposed to be true.
One of my favorite books is Marguerite Henry’s King of the Wind, in which the Godolphin Arabian, a foundation sire of the Thoroughbred, is rescued from pulling a cart through Paris streets.
The horse existed. He did, as in Marguerite Henry’s book, come to England, via France, from an Islamic royal court in the 1720s. He did father outstanding speed in the Thoroughbred, his descendants are winners to this day, and he did love a cat named Grimalkin.
But he was not an Arabian. He was from a special strain of Turkish horse bred as expensive, prestigious gifts for foreign dignitaries. Calling him an Arabian enabled his English owner to charge a larger stud fee.
As a diplomatic gift horse, the Godolphin Arabian was acquired by a French duke and sold for a high price to a rich English breeder. He was five years old then and had always been highly valued.
He never did pull that cart.
But if you love that story, here’s a true version. In 1965 Louise Firouz, an American woman searching for ponies for her riding school, discovered three tiny, beautiful horses pulling carts through the streets of Amol, an Iranian city on the Caspian Sea. Slender, well-proportioned, and averaging about forty inches at the shoulder—just a little taller than a yardstick—they resembled horses depicted on the seal of Persian king Darius around 500 B.C. The king and the lion he hunts both tower over the chariot horses; before Firouz’s discovery this was assumed to be artistic license, or artistic symbolism. Now it seems that the picture may be quite literal.
The horse Louise Firouz rediscovered, the Caspian, has been rescued from near extinction, the Iranian Revolution, and the Iran-Iraq war, and now wins friends around the world for its speed, gentleness, and talent as a driving