In this week’s poem, Lucia Owen invites us into a moving story of youth, age and healing. I love this poem’s dramatic, visceral storytelling, and I love how quietly and profoundly it deepens in its final few lines.

Lucia Owen lives in western Maine where she retired after teaching English. In her eighth decade, she finds that poetry helps her keep on keeping on. Her work has appeared in The Cafe Review, Rust & Moth, The Bellevue Literary Review, Please See Me, After Happy Hour Contest Issue #3 and The Healing Muse (fall 2024).

Barn Chores
By Lucia Owen

Whispers in soft syllables, coven of healing,
they stand together around him, my old horse,
the four young girls who help with barn chores,
after they found him rolling, kicking in his paddock
in the mud, not getting up, nipping at his flanks –
Colic – and they ran for help
on such a hot stormy summer night,
when they knew he could have twisted a gut
and died.

And after help came he stood and shook
and sweated, and they cleaned the mud
from his ears and washed his tail,
rubbed and brushed his back and belly
and haunches, whispered wordless healing,
until his neck lowered, and with eyes half closed
he breathed deeply again in the circle
of their young and healing hands.

The tallest girl steps away and walks
towards me and all at once I see and hear
what they have done in the power of their youth
before I could get there in heat and thunder and fear.
How proud she is that they knew what to do
and how certain she is that if I join their circle
and add my old age to their youth,
more than my old horse will be made whole.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. DEEP WATER: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Barn Chores” copyright 2023 by Lucia Owen, was originally published in Please See Me. It appears by permission of the author.