This is the front cover. The first copy of the book arrived this morning. It is now ready for you if you want to see it!
Here’s the back cover – a slightly different concept – back to front, so to speak.
Memories
Poems for the End of Time
Poems for the End of Time
Here it is, and it is up and waiting for you! I already have my first copy. More on the way. The same artist who did the cover for People of the Mist did this one as well. He’s such a nice person – doesn’t charge me a penny.
Introduction
Poems for the End of Time is composed of two linked collections, Meditations on Messiaen and Lamentations for Holy Week. They both have separate introductions in the body of the text.
My graduate work at the University of Toronto (MA, 1967, and PhD, 1975) included studies on Golden Age / Early Modern Spanish Poetry (16th -17th Centuries). It enabled me to read and enjoy both the Renaissance and the Baroque poetry of Spain. My own interests lay within nature poetry, as expressed by the Spanish Mystics (St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila), the Neo-Platonic Poets (in particular, Fray Luis de León), and the Metaphysical poets (Luis de Góngora and Francisco de Quevedo). Echoes of their writings and thoughts are frequent within these two poetic sequences.
I will write further on both sequences later in the book. Briefly, both sets of poems were written while listening to the music of Olivier Messiaen. Three of his compositions, Quatuor pour la fin du temps / Quartet for the End of Time, Éclairs sur l’au-delà / Lightning over the Beyond, and Petites esquisses d’oiseaux / Little Sketches of Birds, influenced me enormously. I listened to them every day while I was writing and revising these poems.
These poems are not for the simple-minded. They form a contrasting tapestry of point and counter-point, filled with allusions, word-plays, internal rhymes, repetitions, and alliterations. They have a music all of their own.
Do not expect simplistic escapism. If you are serious in your efforts to read, listen to the magic of Messiaen as you turn the pages, much as I did while I was writing.
Redemption
I had no paper with me in the car
so I wrote this poem on a bottle redemption slip.
Redemption
Redemption:
that’s what I seek
and some days it seeks me.
A double need this need to redeem
and be redeemed. A double need too
this god I need, the god who needs me.
Lonely he will be without me,
and I without him.
Knock and the door will open.
Seek and ye shall find.
I look and, yes, he’s there,
him within me and me within him.
This redemption slip is all I need:
empty bottles on the one hand,
my empty heart on the other,
both now redeemed.
All of this while I sit in the car
outside a fast-food chain
wondering if a bullet will come,
to break the car’s window pane,
or someone brutal who will rejoice
in his heaven-sent task of delivering
my personal order of take-out pain.
People of the Mist
People of the Mist
Cover Painting
Pale Face by Moo
Back Cover Synopsis
What if you walked into a church in a foreign country and came face-to-face your dead father? In People of the Mist, Nemo, orphaned as a baby after the suicide of his unmarried mother, seems called to visit Oaxaca, Mexico, the city of the returning dead. Upon arrival, he visits the town’s main cathedral only to encounter his adoptive father, a man he had buried years earlier. Confused by what he thinks is a realistic vision, he seeks the help of a local witch doctor to explain his mirage. The shaman seems to hold the answer and presents him with a broken medallion. He challenges Nemo to find the other half, promising the quest and discovery will reveal the real purpose of the young man being called to Oaxaca.
Brief Biography
Roger Moore, is an award-winning teacher, researcher, poet, and short-story writer. His accolades include being a CBC short story finalist, as well as winning multiple awards from the WFNB. Born in Swansea, Wales, he now lives in Island View, NB, Canada. Between 1995 and 2001, he taught multiple classes in Oaxaca, Mexico, where he first encountered the Mixtec codices.
The Return
The Return
“You’ve been here before,” my Welsh grandmother
told me when she first held me. At least that’s what
they tell me she said. She married into a Catholic family,
but she never converted, refused to give up her own religion.
As a result, they didn’t respect her and never gave her
the treatment she deserved. I would love to ask her:
“Gran, if I was here before, where was I until I came back?”
Maybe she would know. The others wouldn’t dare ask
the question, let alone answer it. The facts of life were
forbidden things, surrounded by a silence of myth
or else spoken gently, in secret whisperings, with nothing
ever revealed to the young and curious.
Once again I have returned here and can honestly say
“yes, I’ve been here before.” This room seemed strange
the first time I visited, and yet it soon became my home from home.
As soon as I open the door, I embrace the familiar.
This room knows me, as I know it.
I walk to the writing desk, look out of the window,
and everything is at it was the last time I was here.
The sea below me sparkles as it always did.
The tower still stands at the end of the island,
and I know full well that, tomorrow morning,
dawn will flood the room with light.
Each day I am here, I will be blessed with a no sé qué
of mystic mystery that will overflow, fill the well
of my inner creativity, and allow me to fulfill
my destiny and praise those things that enlighten
the world and help to fill it with energy and verbal light.
Movement
Movement
Not just the ups and downs, but the small things,
moving, that catch your eye – that butterfly
on the bees’ balm, wings folding, unfolding –
that deer at the wood’s edge, invisible when still,
then suddenly surging into empty space, tail raised,
up and away – that crow, blending into tree black,
then one quick flap, and launched into clear air –
that falcon, perched on the pole, frozen at first,
then taking a step forward, wings folded, dropping,
like a stone then a fast strike on an unsuspecting
robin – silence , pierced by the robin’s shrill shriek,
then silence and peace returned after violence.
Slow movement – the autumn leaves turning color,
a day at a time, almost invisible the change, until one day,
an autumn leaf becomes a whole forest, blushing into
its autumn finery – even slower, the fall’s stealthy approach,
and then, one day, the blue skies turn grey, rain falls,
the wind rises up, and the leaves go tumbling, here, there,
playing strip-jack-naked with limbs and branches.
Looking at my inner world, I feel, but do not see,
winter drawing near – its frosty footprints grip my bones,
snow and frost lie white upon my head, blood flows
thin and slow, seeps life and warmth away, day by day,
inexorable, yes, but also invisible, their still, small steps.
Anonymity
Anonymity
Multiple masks stripped away, old wall paper
shed in strips, layer by layer, until you reveal
the bedrock foundations of your delicate face.
Your visage dissolves before my eyes until you
become what you were when I first met you:
sweet, young, fresh, a delight to catch the eye.
As you still are, to these old, fragile eyes of mine,
cataracts removed and lenses still capable of
seeing you in your spring, although it is your winter.
The snowfall of your hair cannot deny the sparkle
in your eyes, the summer freckles that will soon return,
the sunlight and joy you bring when you enter the room.
Ageing, yes, but you are as young and as sweet
as you always were. How could you not be?
Anonymity peels itself away until no barriers exist
between what you are to me now, and what you were.
It is a lie, that only the young write poetry in praise
of their beloved’s eyebrow, her lips, her gaze.
For how many days have we stood together, as one,
breathing the same air, walking together, facing
the same difficulties, and overcoming them hand in hand?
Yes, we have both slowed down – the way of all flesh –
and we are no different. We wither and perish, but
we haven’t perished yet, although we are withering.
The magic of our love, our gifts, molded into our DNA,
will not perish with us, and never will, not while
our spirits live on and our love creates others in our shape.
Click here for Roger’s reading.
“In the human face, the anonymity of the universe becomes intimate.” John O’Donohue, Cara Anam, p. 37.
The Rover’s Return
The Rover’s Return
The eternal return to The Rover’s Return,
renovated, again and again, but filled
with the ghosts of Ena Sharples and others
who walked this cobbled street before,
and every episode more or less the same,
though décor, characters, accents change
and life becomes ever more complicated
from episode to episode, the street slang
changing slightly, and ageing characters
ageing more and more as time goes by,
and yet the trumpet’s martial sound,
the rhythms of the northern brass bands,
the first of those accents to break the plum
in the mouth snobbery of Oxford English
and the BBC’s domination of the language,
and ‘hey, Mr. Oxford Don, me no graduate,
me immigrate,’ echoing round the abandoned
buildings where the working class once worked,
and the elderly were cared for by their friends
and neighbors, not tossed into care homes,
and abandoned to their fate, as they have been
so often of late, and all things change, in time
with the clocks that tick-tock forward, their clock
work everlasting, and the pigeons still there,
and those crazy chimney pots, and that cat,
slithering down the roof, and the rovers still roving,
then returning, once again to the Rover’s Return.
Click here for Roger’s reading.
Comment: For more than sixty years I have listened to Coronation Street and some things have never changed, the trumpeter from the Brass Band, the rain on the cobbles, the memories and ghosts that linger among brickwork and paint. It takes me back to my childhood, when ITV was the upstart channel that dared to challenge the might of the mighty, one might almost say, the almighty BBC. And now, here in Island View, I turn away from the color and recall the old black and white sets, with their selection of two channels, one of them advert free, and their scheduled times of programs, not the TV blaring twenty four hours a day and two hundred channels available at the touch of a button.
It’s all one sentence, though I had to stop and take a couple of breaths while reading it. My good friend and fellow poet, Jane Tims, has called me ‘the master of the long sentence,” and I do love long sentences, especially when I am in rant mode, like now. But I am also very much aware of other friends that warn me that “your sentences are too long. They are too complicated. I don’t understand them. Write shorter sentences.” OMG, FFS. LMA* – 4 – UAW** – IMHO.
Translation of unusual terms: LMA* = Leave Me Alone. UAW** = You aRe Wrong.
Acknowledgements: My quote from the poem, inaccurate, and from memory, is from John Agard, whose poetry I love. I acknowledge now his poem and its influence upon me. I too am no Oxford don, and I too am an immigrant. His wonderful reading of the full poem can be found here. John Agard, Oxford Don.
Ides of March
Ides of March
Sometimes, as the sun goes down, the shadows close in.
You can sense real people, half-hidden in the mists
rising up from the ground. You shiver in their presence.
They fought a battle here, according to legend.
Legends never lie, though they hide away the facts,
as these mists hide those fallen warriors, brought
back to life, in the half-light, and thirsting for warm blood.
In the distance, blood flows staining the evening sky.
When the hairs on your neck rise up as wraiths, you take
to your heels and run to the place where you left your car.
Westbury White Horse, Badbury Rings, Maiden Castle –
such places are haunted with those whose spirits never left,
never moved on. They stayed here, defending the defenseless,
spirited warriors, never saying die, not even when dead.
Close by, at the hill’s foot, someone has built an altar
crowned by a small, carved cross. Who put those flowers on it?
Who came to bless the peace of those who dream and wait?
The Ides of March have come once more. Now they have gone.
Like all those other Ides before them, like all those years,
those seasons, those warriors. Come and gone. Or not gone,
as you stand there, sensing their spirits, living on and on.
Click here for Roger’s reading.
Comment: The Ides of March – March 15 this year, two days before St. Patrick’s Day. “The Ides of March are come.” “Ay, Caesar. Come but not gone.” William Shakespeare. Julius Caesar. The Ides always seem such a precious time. Sandwiched between St. David (Wales) on March 1 and St. Patrick (Ireland) on March 17, and all so close to the Equinox and the start of spring. It is snowing outside my window as I type. About four inches / ten centimeters down and more to come. But, with the lengthening of the daylight hours and the arrival of spring, we hope the snow won’t last too long.
Landscape
Landscape
Your face: a landscape
luminous in the darkness,
a mapa mundi in the light,
your heart spread out.
My eyes trace the contours,
follow the ups and downs
of your existence, track crows’
feet, crinkling by your eyes.
Time has carved, molded,
sculptured your features.
Wind, snow, wet weather,
sunlight, each has left its mark,
a wrinkle when you frown,
a dimple when you smile.
My eyes want to rest here
for a while, take in the tracks,
pause at the passes, climb hills,
descend into valleys and dales.
Such beauty spread before me.
Such a joy to contemplate
the way you are able to show
the paths I have walked of late.
Click here for Roger’s reading.
“It [landscape] is the most ancient presence in the world, though it needs a human presence to acknowledge it.” John O’Donohue, Anam Cara, p. 37.
rogermoorepoet 