Artefact
Moss Rose and her offspring
– fourteen Clydesdales –
line up on a rig to be photographed
a ploughman holding each one’s head.
The horses and their turnout are magnificent:
in all the country round, there’s nothing like them.
A generation later, when the last of the estate trickled
out of the family’s fingers
and the University Archive took the documents
the last laird could inscribe
every horse’s name, from memory
on the back of this picture.
Though there is
little information about the ploughmen
or what had become of them.
Judith Taylor lives and works in Aberdeen. Her poetry has been published widely in magazines, and her first full-length collection, Not in Nightingale Country, was published in October 2017 by Red Squirrel Press.
Website: http://sometimesjudy.co.uk/
atriumpoetry.com 