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// An Equestrian Gaur 
// Story: Bantam Tales 
// by Chris 
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An Equestrian gaur!
So exotic; so far from home!
Speak, gaur! Why did you roam?
Why did you chance the foam and roil
Of endless seas; the toil
Of unfamiliar soil and air,
What was it drew you there?
Is pony-land so fair and free
That you should wish to be
Equestrian, and see no more
Your homeland’s jungled shore?
Is this your fancy? Or, perchance,
When you see young foals prance
And play their games of chance, and laugh,
Perchance you see a calf.

Perchance you see a calf who played
Such games; who often made
To gambol through both glade and grove.
The calf who always strove
To linger when dark wove its way
Among the trees; when day
Did close. Poor calf! What lay in wait
When you came home too late?
Who stood beside the gate alone?
A matron cow of roan
Whose searching, pale eye shone with ire.
And glinted by the fire.
A crone whose sole desire in life
Was to bring endless strife
To the calf. For his life, she thought
(Aye, she knew that it ought)
Should be built on the thought and tales
Of those gaur whose regales
Would charm the farmers’ vales, those haunts
Where storytellers jaunts
Did ever lead, their wants exchanged
For food and drink. Where ranged
The Speaker, who arranged to tell
The world’s news; to whom fell
That sacred duty: tell a tale.
So each night, without fail,
The cow would tell The Bale of Gold,
A story now so old
That not even the boldest sage
Could say its truthful age,
Or else, perchance, The Wage of Tấm,
Or of old Lac Long Quân, the Drake,
Whose fairie-wife did make to birth
The Breezie-lands, and Earth; 
Whose love was greatest mirth, and yet
Who did forever set
Their love aside, and wet the lands
With their tears. By their hands
Were Fey-dusts and Earth-sands sewn.
But now, they are alone.

As is the cow of roan; no more
Is there a calf to bore
With dusty tales of yore, quick heard,
Quick lost; a thousand word
All heaped about, all blurred, forgot,
Ignored, all left a plot,
A name, a fragment shot with woe,
Or laughter, or a slow
Excitement, quick to grow… to what?
I cannot recall what.
I no longer know what is lost.
There was so little, crossed
The wild and tempest-tossed wide sea
So little still with me.
So now, in Equestria… here…
I watch the young foals cheer,
And in them, through them, peer and see
A calf, too, too carefree
Too quick to turn and flee a gift
Too quick to set adrift, to spurn
The tales of home, to yearn
For distant lands and burn as dross
The golden story-floss
Which—fool!—he once did cross the earth
To flee its burden-girth.

But still remains some worth of thought;
Some tales remain, some plot,
Some monsters still are caught in mind,
Some heroes still I find.
And properly designed six-eight;
The Lục bát to create.
The better for to state my pride,
My culture, long denied,
I’ll share what still abide in mind,
In ear and tongue, my kind.
And when I do, my kind shall be
Not I alone, not me,
But us! We shall be we! and when
We meet and mix, why then…
We’ll be Equestrian and gaur!