Indian ponies are typically small but hardy, robust horses of western North America descended from stock introduced by Spaniards and re-domesticated by Native Americans that are valuable as utility range horses and for crossbreeding. Many are piebald in color.  Other horses of comparison are the pinto pony, mustang, and the quarter horse.​  

This segment on the Lac Lacroix Indian Pony rare breed preservation effort may help you to know the pony "characters" in the poem -- but "breaking into blossom?"  Well, does anybody know how to explain that kind of blessing?  

Another great physician-writer is William Carlos Williams.  Though famous for the "I have eaten the plums" poem ("This is Just to Say"), he was also an essayist, novelist, and playwright.  Doctoring for 40 years, he pulled information from his town Rutherford, NJ,  his patients, and the evolving America around him as the subjects for his writing.  After a long-sustained interest in writing despite his parents' demand for perfectionism in his medical training, Williams moved beyond his early interest in the strictures of John Keats poetics to develop a uniquely American voice.  Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound were his new text mentors.  He also claims that having met Ezra Pound was the turning point in his own stylistic development. William Carlos Williams is associated with modernism and imagism and was a Pulitzer Prize Winner for Poetry.  

One of my favorites is his novel length poem Paterson. His author note explains:​

Tell me about time passing. What images do you associate with time passing – things growing or things receding? How do you measure time’s passing? What do you do with your time?  Write for 10 minutes.  Ready? Go.

• "Blades" by C.K. Williams 

​There is not an online version of this poem in its accurate form.  Williams has included specific line breaks, lines with single words, and lines with provocative phrases, that a reader should presume significant.  So I have reproduced it above in the same format it was published in  C.K. Williams Selected Poems. Copyright © 1994 by C. K. Williams. First published in 1994 by Farrar, Straus ad Giroux. This edition first published in 1995 by The Noonday Press.

•  C.K. Williams bio and Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry

• How is "hazy memory" portrayed in the poem?
• How is the speaker characterized throughout the poem?
• Where are the shifts in the poem? How do they happen?

Many readers don't go back to reconsider the title. In "Blades,"  multiple denotations and connotations of the title add layers of meaning to the poem, even hinting at more information about the narrator.  Readers already know a blade is the cutting part of a knife or other tools or weapon, and understand quite quickly that in this case the speaker "stabbed" the girl with a broken off car antenna--the first "blade" in the poem. 

But a blade is also a literary reference to a sword and to a cavalier, dashing young man.  Can we see the speaker as such in his youthful carelessness?  If he did indeed wield a sword of sorts against the girl, could the act be seen as a childhood version of sword fighting forced upon another neighborhood kid not ready for the game? How many times have I seen pool noodles, paper towel tubes, and indeed any "blade"-like item being brandished as a sword? Can each be speaking to the "innocence" of the stabbing as a sword-fighting game perpetrated by a cavalier young boy in the neighborhood? 

The blade of the tongue is the portion directly behind the tip of the tongue. Is this a reference to the speaker as an older version of the character in the poem, attempting to make sense of the day's events and its profound impact on him through the work of words, albeit written and not spoken, in the poem itself?  As a blade cuts through something, the speaker seems to be cutting through past memories to "get the straight again."

Additionally, the shoulder blades are presumably where a wing would be positioned -- a "blazing wing of holiness" that blots out everything else. The title itself encompasses the many layers of intention in the poem.

I am also struck by the speaker's profound sense of loneliness and the function of or need to attach himself to the person who actually did the stabbing, attach himself to the mother character, and by the end, presumably attach himself to the girl, in kissing her.  How/why does the speaker believe he did the stabbing yet later pronounces it wasn't him at all but another kid who was  "black" striking another little girl, who incidentally was "black," as well?  What is his true connection to the action, that he substitutes himself for the perpetrator in his memory?  I contend he is characterized as the lonely kid on the edge of the crowd and of all the action. As his retelling is populated with exact details: from facial expressions to the pulling up of the shirt to the "cold circle of  faces" in the crowd to the cops driving the boy around the corner and releasing him--it seems he has been moving along with the action, observing and reporting (years later) what he had seen. Playing with a broken off car antenna--is that debris he has picked up as a toy or a willful destructive act previously committed? Because he said he carried it around with him in his pocket, something to use, his picking it up and brandishing it feels like he may have acquired it out of incidental boredom.

His desire to be included in the horror of the mother's expression at what happened, in the mother's potentially sweeping up the children in  the incident and pulling them to hold against her, and in being lifted by the mother as a giant blazing wing of holiness that blocks out the light, point to something lonely and excluded in the boy/speaker.  The point of view of the speaker moves from the inside of the action to the outside by the end of the poem -- from the kid who did the stabbing, to someone who observed, to someone who wants to be swept up and redeemed, to someone who finally retells the story from the farthest distance.  The storytelling in the poem moves from the central conflict, radiating out and out and out to involve multiple bystanders, and the distance of time, and indeed, us, the readers.  As he includes himself, he is including us, as well.

Tell about a time when you didn’t do something you thought you would.  What did you not follow through on, why not? What were the real or perceived consequences? Benefits?  Write for 10 minutes. Ready? Go!

Write a poem that simultaneously imagines what could have happened and what did happen in its place.  Write for 15 minutes.

A Midsummer Night's Stroll by Philip Nikolayev