If you follow Honeycutt’s blog, you know that he shares a lot of secrets about horses and their interactions. Today’s update on Sinatra comes straight from the horse’s mouth…
Now if you were to look out and see me, you would see something white right next to me. If you looked again a little while later, you would see the white thing again! The white thing is called Sinatra, do you know that thing? Sinatra is another SAFE horse who lives with me now, and he is always right next to me, being the opposite of my shadow.
Many years ago, Sinatra was something even more terrible than a Pointy Horse: he was a Pointy Foal! Thinking about Pointy Foals makes me want to hang my head all the way down to the ground and sigh. Pointy Foals are the most wrong thing of all. All foals should be round and fuzzy and run in big circles around their round mother. They should not be hungry and cold like Sinatra was. Sinatra is no longer Pointy, thanks to my friends at SAFE, but there is something about Sinatra that is still not quite right. Mom says Sinatra is Special, and I suppose that is why I let him be the opposite of a shadow because normally I am not the sort of horse that tolerates such behavior. Mom says she knew for sure that Sinatra was Special when she saw him eating my lovely hays right out of my lovely hay feeder right next to me! If Jay or the Big Baby tried to eat my hays right next to me, I would tell them to clear off pronto, and they would too! Sinatra just pretends he doesn’t understand and keeps eating the hays…and for some reason I don’t fully understand, I let him do this. Maybe it’s because he was a Pointy Foal, or maybe because he’s Special but whatever the reason, Sinatra is exempt from the normal rules of horses. So he is my white shadow, and I’m okay with that.
I have not been writing very much poetry lately, and that leaves a hole in my heart where art is supposed to be, so I decide to stand under the big tree and work on a new haiku. Sinatra was there, and he wanted to know what I was doing so I told him that a haiku was a very short poem with a pattern of five hoofbeats then seven hoofbeats and then five more hoofbeats. I wrote a haiku for Sinatra to help him understand:
Sinatra is white
He trails me like a shadow
A shadow that’s white
Sinatra loved the poem and asked me to write another one for him:
My hays are right here
And your hays are over there
But sure, we can share.
Sinatra would have had me writing poems about every single aspect of our lives together, but I told him that he could find great peace and wisdom by writing poems himself. He was very eager to try. His first poem went like this:
Hello! Who are you?
Who are you? What are you doing? Is that a deer? I am hungry!
Shoelace.
Very quickly I realized that Sinatra is probably a little Too Special to start by writing haiku. I decided that perhaps he should attempt to write a knock-knock joke instead, do you know that thing? Here is one that is very funny:
Knock knock
Who is there?
Tasty, tasty grain.
Tasty, tasty grain who?
Tasty, tasty grain who I want to eat!!
That is a very funny knock-knock joke. Here is Sinatra’s knock-knock joke:
Knock knock knock knock knock knock knock
(Mom: Sinatra stop kicking the wall!!!!)
Knock knock knock knock who is there? who are you? who am I?
Shoelace.
Knock knock knock knock
(Mom: Sinatra, I mean it!)
Sinatra’s knock-knock joke seems to be loosely based on his haiku. It may be a while before Sinatra’s Poem Book comes out.
