"She had some horses" by Joy Harjo

In "She had some horses", Joy Harjo metaphorically uses horses to represent the struggles the female speaker is going through and the contradicting thoughts that she is attempting reconcile. Harjo uses many contrasting images to convey this throughout the poem. In the first stanza, Harjo compares the horses to "fur and teeth", an image that implies that the horses are strong and protective. Then, Harjo contradicts her previous comparison by saying that the horses were "clay and they would break". This image personifies the horses as weak. Many contradictory statements such as this one appear in the poem like when Harjo says that the female speaker has had horses "who lied" and horses "who told the truth, who were stripped bare of their tongues". In contrasting these ideas, Harjo is trying to show the instability of the female speaker and her indecisiveness.
I do not agree with Harjo when she says that the horses are neither male nor female because the impression that I get from the poem is that the horses are male. In the examples I used previously, comparing horses to men makes sense. The female speaker could have had "horses" who "fur and teeth" and others who were "clay and they would break". The same goes for having had "horses who lied" and horses "who told the truth". This poem is the speaker's internal battle about men, how to understand their ways and how to deal with what has happened to her in the past. If the horses are indeed male, the line "She had horses who tried to save her, who climbed in her bed at night and prayed as they raped her" has a very disturbing truth to it. The female speaker appears to have been raped in the past, possibly more than once as horses is plural, so she has many issues with men. What has happened in past relationships or interactions with men have been traumatizing. That is not to say that the speaker did not have good relationships with men, as she notes that some horses "danced with their mothers" or "waltzed nightly on the moon". However, even then I get the sense that there is a more pessimistic undertone that to these lines like the horse who "danced with their mothers" was a mama's boy and and the horse that "waltzed nightly on the moon" stayed out to late and never came home.
Within the poem, there are many truths that are uncovered. One in particular is how much the opposite sex can affect another person's thought process, emotions and well-being. The speaker obviously had a past full of lies and heartbreak, which is enough to make anyone second guess themselves and struggle to reconcile their conflicting feelings. The speaker expresses her final opinion of men in the last stanza when she says that she "had some horses she loved. She had some horses she hated. These were the same horses". To the speaker, the men whom she loved and hated were ultimately men and all the same. It is a depressing note to end on, since after the speaker's past, the reader wants her to be hopeful that one day she will be swept off her feet. But, the speaker concludes that, to her, all men are deranged horrible people and she cannot forgive what has happened to her in the past.