Thanksgiving
This new day rises
gift-glorious before me.
I untie sleep’s wrappings,
all paper and string.
Birds throng branches,
light up the yard with
rainbows of sound,
arcing and arching.
Fall colors streak trees
with overnight paint.
A woodpecker breakfasts
on the back porch.
Chipmunk and chickadee
thrive on the lawn.
Red robins, tipsy,
giving thanks for the feast.
Teeter-totter branches
alive with berries and song.
Click here for Roger’s reading on Anchor.
Thanksgiving.
To be a writer
revised version
To be a writer ….
Those who would true valor see,
let them come hither.
One here will constant be,
through foul or fair weather.
There’s no discouragement
will make her once relent
her first avowed intent,
to be a writer.
Those who beset her round
with dismal stories,
do but themselves confound:
her strength the more is.
No blank page can her fright,
she’ll with a sentence fight,
and she will have a right,
to be a writer.
Rejections nor false friends
can daunt her spirit.
She knows she at the end
will a book inherit.
So critics fly away,
she’ll fear not what they say,
she’ll labor night and day
to be a writer.
Click here for Roger’s reading on Anchor.
To be a writer
revised version
Comment: I first wrote this poem in January 2021. It is, of course, a rewriting of John Bunyan’s hymn / poem, To be a pilgrim from Pilgrim’s Progress. In the original version, I kept the male pronouns. However, after collaborating as the only male participant in [Quick Brown Fox] Brian Henry’s Advanced Writing Group of 13 fantastic women writers, I realized that the female pronoun was, in so many cases, the most appropriate one. I therefore made the necessary adjustments. You can find the old poem at this link – personally, I prefer the new version! https://rogermoorepoet.com/2021/01/11/to-be-a-writer/
Suit of Lights
I am a man of straw
shivered by raw winds,
frosted by the cold
enveloping this enigmatic body,
dry bones set rattling.
I walk with two sticks,
a stick man then,
not just a sick man,
as broken as this broken body,
old sack of out-muscled blood.
When the magic hour
descends, earth glows
with a different light,
and my world is transformed,
translucent, bright.
A touch of the almighty,
this beauty suddenly
surrounding me,
blessing me,
and all my doubts,
with this suit of lights.
Click here for Roger’s reading on Anchor.
Suit of Lights
Birds of a Feather
Oh my, oh my,
how the days go rushing by.
It’s like watching birds that fly
or feathers falling from the sky
to lie at tree foot where you must
just let them lie to gather dust.
Click for Roger’s reading on Anchor.
Birds of a Feather
Quilting
A man among many women,
I sit silent, feeling their eyes
explore my flesh, my stitches.
I need glasses now for delicate
needlework. To thread a needle
the workshop leader has a gadget.
It passes from hand to hand,
ties the perfect quilter’s knot.
My grandpa’s canvas sewing kit,
World War One Vintage, served him
before the mast and in the trenches.
From it, I take a small looped wire.
I remember when I could see and he
could not, hence his need for me
to thread the needle and knot the knot
that he could no longer knot.
Now I choose my tiny patches,
join them, stitch them into a square
and, ironed out, into the quilt.
We must sign them, and I do.
My name and little sayings
in Spanish, Latin, and Welsh.
The leader asks me to translate them
then writes the meanings down.
“Beautiful work,” she tells me.
“Where did you learn to sew?”
I close my eyes, sew my lips tight.
Some secrets I’ll never let go.
Click for Roger’s reading on Anchor.
Quilting
Comment: I wrote this after reading the section entitled Quilt in M. Travis Lane’s book A Tent, a Lantern, An Empty Bowl (Windsor: Palimpsest Press, 2019). Poems that could double as paintings, proclaims the paragraph on the back cover. I have no such talent. My own poem is more of a memoir in the form of a narrative sequence. To each his or her own, or, in the modern parlance, to all their own. And a poet must do what a poet can do, each of us adding our own little offerings to the great sea that is poetry.
Do Not Keep Count
On reading Keeping Count
poems by M. Travis Lane
Poems to be picked at
like a bunch of verbal grapes,
muscatel, perhaps, purpling,
seedless, their only off-spring
flowing through your mind.
Pluck one at random.
Hold its silken surface to the light.
Admire sunlight caressing
the unwrinkled skin.
Now taste it.
Savour it slowly,
tongue-held in your mouth.
Watch the world around you
changing as you see things
in so many different ways.
Everything moves into a new orbit.
Your world – born anew.
Just one?
No.
You cannot stop at one.
Taste another. Then another.
Do not keep count.
Click here for Roger’s reading on Anchor.
Do Not Keep Count
Comment: Sitting at my kitchen table, picking at Travis’s poems as I would pick at grapes, or flowers, I wrote this poem. Yesterday, Travis gifted me with her poetry book Keeping Count (Guelph, Gordon Hill Press, 2020). I hope my admiration for the poetry of M. Travis Lane – who has received less attention than she deserves (according to Maisonneuve) – shines though the words and images in this poem of mine.
Grief
Grief leads us to the cliff’s edge.
It hardens our features,
brings tears to our eyes,
or turns our hearts into stones,
hard as rocks, cement blocks
that feel nothing.
Sometimes it pushes us
over the edge and we fall,
down, down, into a darkness
that never, ever seems to end.
Friends desert us.
Food is fruitless and fallow.
Our table top is a desert,
barren and bare,
with a lone and level
patchwork cloth that stretches
into far-reaching Saharas,
Gobi wastes of endless sand.
Who will resurrect the dying heart?
Who will hold it in their hands
and bring it pulsing back to life?
If you won’t do it for yourself
nobody else will care to try.
Think of the happy times,
the times when the sun shone,
the earth was warm,
and your life was a walk
in a garden full of flowers.
Then feel the sharp stones
beneath your feet and know
that joy and sorrow,
laughter and tears,
sun and clouds and rainbows too
will always grow
to lighten the lives
of all of us who dwell below.
Click for Roger’s reading on Anchor.
Grief
The Way
Old Roman Road
Puerto del Pico
I sought the way and thought
I had found the way, but now
I feel I have lost my way.
Long walked I in shadow and sun,
hard Roman road beneath my feet.
Then I found bleached beach sand,
heard the sea-gull’s piercing sound,
walked sun-path, moon-path, bright
across a shimmering bay and knew
that by chance I had found my way.
Then came the way of ice and snow,
Hudson Bay parka, the ski way,
the snow shoe way of winter boots,
and still I believed, eyes wide open
that I knew I was still on the way.
Now my feet are old and slow.
Blood runs cold, bones ache,
head spins, heart is an ambush,
lungs throb and clutch at air,
head in hands I sit in despair,
hoping to be found,
draped over a shoulder,
brought safe to flatter ground,
comforted, and set again on my way.
Click for Roger’s reading on Anchor.
The Way
Moo by Fin
Finley has left. She has left me with a selection of her art and instructions to ‘show it to the world’. S o, here we have the Portrait of Moo by Fin. I guess many of you don’t know who Moo is, but don’t worry about it, neither do I and Fin has been busy for three weeks, trying to work it out for herself. Oh dear – what can the matter be? Finish the song for yourself, if you remember it in any of its many versions.
Meanwhile, I go back to my old friend, Robbie Burns, with whom I spoke only yesterday. He spoke to me through my eyes and, as I sat there talking, I digested his words of wisdom: “Ah would some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us.” The giftie gie us is, as you well know, the Scottish dialect for what comes out in Standard English as the gift give us.
So that’s how Fin sees Moo. When I next meet him, if he cares to show up chez nous, I will show him Fin’s portrait and ask him what he thinks. Until then, his identity – and I am assuming he is a he not a she – must remain a mystery as mysterous as this mysterious painting that appeared on my desk.
Cloud of Unknowing
Sometimes the yearning heart
wraps itself in a cloud of unknowing.
Then come doubts and fears and a sense
of being alone and abandoned,
adrift on a rising sea, with night
drawing nigh and no horizon in sight.
But, at the centre of that cloud
that aching heart still thirsts
for cool water to soothe and cure
the ills of an internal world
that seeks a lighthouse on a shore
yet finally finds that light within itself,
and then is safe, and lost no more.
