Todd Davis

Pit Ponies

Hooves cross the carved history
of horses harnessed to coal carts, forgotten

century orphaned like a corpse. An echo
of a mare’s whicker as she’s forced to mate

in darkness, offspring birthed from dust
to reshape the world with labor. In this place

a pickaxe strikes the blurred edge of a lantern,
and at midmorning a mud-caked carrot is brought

to searching lips, a pail of blackened water
to relieve a cracked tongue. The rest of the day

nothing but iron’s tang on stone, grunts of men
scoring rock to burn. At night in earthen entrails

ponies eat hay scattered in wooden boxes, lick
sweating walls to dull the boredom of thirst.

Moldy straw’s the only bed, and sleep’s a respite
soiled with fear the lantern’s glow won’t return.

Always again the calloused hand slapping
a winnowed rump, urging another step.

Todd Davis is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Coffin Honey and Native Species, both published by Michigan State University Press. He has won the Midwest Book Award, the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Bronze and Silver Awards, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, and the Bloomsburg University Book Prize. His poems appear in such journals and magazines as Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Missouri Review, North American Review, Orion, Southern Humanities Review, and Western Humanities Review. He teaches environmental studies at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College.