Leslie Monsour is the author of The Alarming Beauty of the Sky (2005), several chapbooks, including The House Sitter, winner of the 2010 Finishing Line Press Chapbook Competition, and, in 2021, The Colosseum Critical Introduction to Rhina P. Espaillat. Her poems, essays, interviews, and translations have been published in such magazines as Poetry, The Dark Horse, Able Muse, Mezzo Cammin, Alabama Poetry Review, Literary Matters, Measure, The Raintown Review, and The American Arts Quarterly. Monsour has received a Fellowship in Literature from The National Endowment for the Arts, as well as five Pushcart Prize nominations.
Herd at Ballyvaughan, Recollected in California
The silence was superb at summer’s end;
The crows were elsewhere on the sunny bay;
The pasture and the hills, a greeny blend
Of grasses in the stillness of midday.
The cattle in the center of the field
Were all that could be heard, their tug and munch
A syncopated chant of herbal yield,
Their universe a pasture bright with lunch.
The quiet rhythm of the afternoon
Could almost put the whole world in a trance;
Thus, it occurred to me to hum a tune
As I stood yards away outside the fence.
The curly-coated Galloways, young steers
Brought up for beef, lifted their faces one
By one, bright yellow tags pinned to their ears,
And listened, moving towards me in the sun.
I thought of Helios’s sacred cattle,
The foolish sailors on a killing spree;
I heard the lapping tide where puffins paddle
And thought about the isle at Innisfree.
And then I sang the “Song of Wandering Aengus,”
The Angus, kin to Galway’s curly-coat,
And Yeats the poet who wrote about and sang us
Tales of mystic Celtic anecdote.
Today, I summon Yeats’s deep heart’s core,
The peaceful herd at Galway’s glassy bay,
Come, grace the groves of oak and sycamore
In these dry hills five thousand miles away.
Stella and Her Bone
How tenderly her tongue
Takes marrow from the bone,
Secured between her paws,
As if to clean her young.
Protected, as her own.
How lovingly she gnaws
And cracks it in her jaws.
The Fifth Horseman
I once owned a tropical pony
Of Peruvian Paso descent
Bred from those brought by murderous Pizarro
To plunder the continent.
The bloodline continued and flourished,
Evolving in fair replica
As a bush horse bred mostly for pleasure
Throughout Central America.
The stable hand’s name was Edwin.
A machete hung at his side.
He cleared out the trail every morning
Before others went out for a ride.
Overnight, the golden silk spiders
Spun orb webs a meter wide.
I never rode into the forest
Without Edwin before me as guide.
“At night dey catch ratbat and owl, mon,”
He’d say, as we rode through the trees,
Slicing silk with his rusted machete.
“In Jamaica, mon, plenty of dees.”
The place was too sultry for saddles—
We used nothing but bridle and bit—
Not a pad or a blanket, just horse sweat
And welts; I was soon used to it.
Early morning, the horses were freshest—
They’d leap over culvert and log,
As the canopy woke with the racket
Of capuchin, parrot, and frog.
Now and then, we caught sight of the quetzal,
The blending iguana and viper,
And every nymphalidae butterfly
Of sapphire, ruby, and copper.
On the floor of the soft-wood forest
Pink ginger bloomed in the mud
And the path sometimes sank like a quicksand,
Under puddles from yesterday’s flood.
But our sure-footed ponies were savvy,
Stepping lightly and circling around
On a carpet of fern bed and grasses,
While avoiding the fire ant’s mound,
Where anteaters dig for their breakfast,
Immune to the stinging attacks.
Then the trail reached the stream, and the horses
Would swim us across on their backs,
With Edwin on guard for the caimans
That lurk on the shore or afloat,
While the sloth sleeps on high in the branches,
And the moths lay their eggs in her coat.
There, she dreams of the end of her species
To the hum of the stingless bees,
As they sing to the dwindling forest
How the cast has been cut with the trees—
For the house has exceeded capacity,
And the show’s not so mighty these days:
Unlike the great God of the empires,
Nature works in well-understood ways.
The prophet who wrote of the horsemen—
Death, Pestilence, Famine, and War—
Unknowingly left out the fifth one:
Mass Extinction surpasses all four.
He’s been picking up speed at full gallop
After sixty-or-so, million years.
Neither Edwin nor I could foresee it,
When we rode there like two pioneers
On our Panamanian ponies
Of Peruvian Paso descent
Bred from those brought by murderous Pizarro
To plunder the continent.
The Galway Review 