Heavy Horses--A Rock and Roll Epistle
By Richard Girard
"Iron-clad feather-feet pounding the dust,
An October's day, towards evening;
Sweat embossed veins standing proud to the plough,
Salt on a deep chest seasoning.
Last of the line at an honest day's toil,
Turning the deep sod under;
Flint at the fetlock, chasing the bone,
Flies at the nostrils plunder.
The Suffolk, the Clydesdale, the Percheron vie
with the Shire on his feathers floating;
Hauling soft timber into the dusk,
to bed on a warm straw coating.
Heavy Horses, move the land under me;
Behind the plough gliding--slipping and sliding free:
Now you're down to the few
And there's no work to do
The tractor's on its way."
"Heavy Horses," Jethro Tull
Heavy Horses, (1979)
I have the great good fortune to have been blessed with the constitution of a Clydesdale, and excellent surgeons.
My surgery was in reality a twofer: a hemithyroidectomy for a growth on the right half of my thyroid; followed by the fusion of my C4, C5, C6, and C7 vertebrae. The growth, some three inches across in its largest dimension, was benign, but it had to be taken out before the neurosurgeon could perform the fusion of the anterior cervical vertebrae, whose degeneration threatened me with paralysis or death in the next two to five years.
Now, two weeks after my twin operations, I feel sufficiently functional to sit down at my computer and write again. I just can't spend hour after hour doing so yet.
As the movie poster from Hammer Film's Dracula Has Risen From the Grave-- which shows Christopher Lee's Dracula pulling the stake from his undead heart--states, "You just can't keep a good man down."
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