12/11/2025
I never had a squad of horses,
but in my dreams, a nameless herd gallops,
beasts of light biting the horizon
as if the world were a field just born.
Except for that thin, wounded, and sick horse
that one day cost me several weeks of my pay.
My mother asked me to buy it from an old man and a child,
because the animal was fading away.
I still don’t know if I bought it for the sorrow in their eyes,
for the grief of the grandfather and the boy,
or for my mother, who loved the countryside
and came from a ranch in Oaxaca
where the world smelled of sheep,
echoed with the call of hens,
and pulsed with the nobility of horses.
We cared for him.
Week after week, his body regained its light,
weight returned to his ribs,
and his breath stopped sounding like farewell.
Until one day the old man came back.
Then the horse’s eyes lit up,
and his neigh became a hymn of freedom.
We didn’t have the heart to keep him;
I let him go with the same love
with which we had received him that aimless day.
And then I understood something that never wears out:
an act of kindness can illuminate many lives,
slipping into corners we cannot imagine,
needing no applause, no spotlight, no witness.
What is given sincerely
only knows how to return to the heart
with the same purity with which it was offered.
So I go on, without a herd,
but with the memory of that rescued horse
galloping through my story
as a reminder that nobility,
when it chooses to appear,
always leaves its footprints on the earth.
Rosy Peraza Rios
Painting Available
Mixed technique oil,acrilyc,metal sheet
1.22 x 1.00 meter
