The Hill Still Remembers...

Tartan Farm.

Where once mornings steamed

Off thoroughbred backs that breathed and dreamed.

Where fences stitched the emerald land

With weathered post and careful hand,

Where hooves once drummed a steady hymn

At starting gate and pasture rim.

And foals rose blinking, all knees and grace,

To claim the promise of that place.

Florida clouds rolled slow and vast,

Time itself reluctant to pass.

The oaks stood guard in patient rows,

Counting seasons by the foals.

And up upon the highest swell,

Where the wind grew quiet and stories fell,

They laid their champions side by side,

On the proudest crest of countryside.

Not just horses, fast and grand,

But living thunder of this land.

Marble marked the sacred part,

Each stone a silenced, racing heart.

And there among them, fierce and bright,

Slept Dr. Fager, flame of flight,

The horse who bent the clock to will,

Who ran like weather over hill.

Now resting where the pasture sighed,

Crowned in grass, in legend tied.

The hill held more than soil and sod.

It held the breath of horse and God.

It held the hush before the bell,

The sweat, the prayer, the final yell.

But now bright stakes invade the ground,

Blueprint blossoms, square and sound.

Survey flags in orange flare

Flutter through the thinning air.

The barn’s low creak, the pasture’s hush,

Are traded for development’s rush.

Bulldozers hum a leveling tune,

An iron and indifferent monsoon.

They plane the rise, they press the clay,

They grid the sky in measured way.

Soon porches perch where foals once ran,

And glossy signs read “Estates at Tartan.”

Cul-de-sacs curl where fences stood,

Mailboxes bloom from treated wood.

Garages rise near sacred crest

Where champions were laid to rest.

Where mares once grazed in silver dawn,

There stretches manicured lawn.

Where wind once combed a golden mane,

It tangles now as new residents complain .

Ocala the Horse Capital of the World

It was crowned and has endured,

But now seems somehow fragile, less secure.

For when we trade the field for plan,

We bury more than just the land.

Yet stand there still at dusk’s last light,

When sun spills honeyed gold on night,

And if you listen past the cars,

Past porch lights flickering into stars,

You might just hear, beneath the din,

A phantom gallop rising thin.

A hoofbeat under concrete’s seam.

A breath inside the developer’s dream.

The hill still remembers.

The wind tells a yarn.

It whispers softly Tartan Farm.

Tartan Farm. Tartan Farm.