Elegy For Colin

We slow the world down to share an elegy for Colin, a farrier whose six-week visits shaped more than hooves. 

Jessica’s piece sets a quiet, reflective mood over people that have left this world. Colin the farrier as a steady presence over years, left a deep impression on Jessica’s view of the world. With sensory images of horses, tools and routine craft, small appointments become life-shaping rituals, where grief arrives late, gratitude arriving clear.
The line that anchors the poem: one’s nature is what matters most. 

This story is available in the anthology Voice Within: A Storybook by Storytellers Edition II.

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Chapters

• 0:02 Welcome To Voice Within
• 0:12 Settle In With Imagination
• 0:48 The Young Poet Behind The Lens
• 1:35 Introducing Colin The Farrier
• 2:23 Reading: Elegy For Colin
• 3:37 The Nature That Endures

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

Voice Within, a collection of short stories, letters and poems narrated to you. Get cozy, warm cup of tea in hand. Take your ears and imagination to places a number of authors aspire to take you with their tales. Now, this young poet uh had really taken a bit of my heart during the photo shoot of her uh portraiture photo that you find in addition to at the back alongside her interview. As we were just journeying through, she Jessica was quite shy about being taken um photo of, but we were in the back of the Promised Land uh by the river there in Bellingen, and it was just so magical, the lightning, lightning, lighting that came through, and it was just a magical experience, and I was able to take some really profound and gorgeous photos with that lighting. Uh, so the poem that I'm going to read to you today is an elegy for Colin, and Colin was a farrier who used to visit her property uh every six weeks for five years to chain the hoods on her horses. And Colin passed away, and years down the track, Jessica felt the impact of losing this character or this person in her life, and how he or his insights uh brought her closer to some realizations over the years. So this is her piece dedicated to Colin. I would call them in and catch them each, a simple knot, below the eye, a quick gesture of man, out the way, the feeling scent of horses, the tang of your car's exhaust, the habitual six weeks. How not much really seemed to progress that somehow the years flew six weeks and there'd be white fillings white filings in the grass. You could be gently shrugging their legs up, the presence of curling cartilage, sometimes thin, sometimes thick, depending on the rainfall on the summer. Your family as well. I'm doing well at school. The new ras catches and bites the old one has a couple left in it. You loved finely built horses, something leggy with vascularity and deep lungs. Give me a thoroughbred or a stock horse any day, you would say. And later, with one glove on the wither and catch cash in the other, you would sum up the previous conversation by reminding me that at the end of the day all that really matters in a horse or in anything at all is its nature.