The horse and the gun.

I knew a man when I was young,
with a look in his eyes like that of a horse accustomed to gunshot.
Kind, big, wide, honest, strained eyes
waiting on a knife’s edge,
for the next round to go off.
Peacefully grazing
in whichever field he found himself in,
forgetting himself, and the gun,
until a tyre would blow on the old metal roads
and his ears would dart back from the clover
and he would be gone. Hoofs clanking against one another,
echoing up the mist of the hills,
as he galloped as far away as he could
from where he was.