Poems

Snow Geese

Snow: no geese!

Snow Geese

Snow geese falling, plummeting from the sky,
dropping like leaves, slowly and tumbling,
swiftly and twisting, spiralling down. Fresh
snow on the ground, their seasoned arrival.

Some land on water, others on the earth.
They gather in groups, snow banks of geese,
ghost-white, frightening, true sky lightning,
celestial, striking from its ancestral throne.

Always some sentries, necks stretched, eyes
open, alert, watching, guarding their needs
while the flock feeds. One honks “Who goes
there?” the flock looks up, watching him move.

Slowly, at first, they waddle from the walkers,
then faster and faster as the man unleashes his
hounds. An idiot woman, grinning like a death’s
head, points her cell phone and barks instructions.

The dogs run at them, barking and growling.
The snow geese panic, run ever faster, taking
to the air with a clap-wing chorus, honking
and hooting. The woman laughing, shouting

and shooting. “I’ve got them, I’ve shot them,”
she calls in her pleasure. Frustrated, the hounds
take to the water. Whistling, calling, the man
cannot catch them, not till they tire of the chase,

no match for geese, not in air, nor in water.
Joyous the couple, their videos made, hugging,
cuddling. They get back in the car, dogs shaking,
spraying them, baptismal water, cleansing all guilt.

Geese: no snow.

Click on the link for Roger’s reading.
Snow Geese

Song without Words

Song without Words

I wanted to sing you a song
to keep you alive
but you slipped through my fingers
and fled from my sight

I still sense your presence
but no longer know
the shape of your face

your voice on the phone
unique unforgettable,
a voice without face

voiceless and faceless
fleshless yet graceful
just what you were
a presence a spirit
a force in my life

a grey fleshless shadow
a mist in my mind
I know I never knew you

two different worlds
a world without music
a song without words
my love song to you
however absurd

Click on this link for Roger’s reading.
Song without Words

Water

Water

Water: does it remember when the earth was without form
and darkness lay upon the face of the deep?

Water gathered into one place and the firmament appeared.
Then light drifted apart from darkness and with light
came The Word, more words, and then the world …

… the world of water in which I was carried until
the waters broke and my life sustaining substance
drained away ejecting me from dark to light.

Here, in Oaxaca, the valley’s parched throat
longs for water, born free, yet everywhere imprisoned.
It languishes in bottles, tins, jars, and frozen cubes,
its captive essence staring out with grief filled eyes.

A young boy on a tricycle pedals past my apartment.
He carries a dozen prison cells, each with forty captives,
forty fresh clean bottles of warm water.
“¡Peragua!” he call out to me. “¡Super Agua!”
he holds out his hand and asks me to pay
a handsome ransom to set some of these captives free.

Real water yearns to be released, to be set free from its captivity,
to trickle out of the corner of your mouth, to drip from your chin,
to slip from your hand and seek sanctuary in dust and sand.

Real water slips through your hair and leaves you squeaky clean.
It is a mirage of palm trees upon burning sand. It is the hot sun
dragging its blood red tongue across the sky and panting for water
like a great big thirsty dog.

A Golden Oldie
Click on the link below for the earlier version.
https://rogermoorepoet.com/2016/04/28/water/

Click on this link for Roger’s reading.
Water


Alebrijes

Alebrijes

 Are they half-grasped dreams
that wake, wide eyed, to a new day’s sun?

Or are they alive and thriving
when they fall from the tree?

Does the carver fish their color and shape
from his own interior sea,
or does he watch and wait for the spirit
to emerge from its wooden cocoon
to be reborn in a fiery block of color?

Daybreak:
in a secluded corner of my waking mind,
my neighbor’s dog greets the dawn with sparks
of bright colors born from his bark.

My waking dream: dark angels with butterfly bodies,
their inverted wings spread over my head to keep me warm.
In the town square, the local artist plucks dreams
from my head and paints them on carved wood.

A Golden Oldie
Click on this link for early version.
https://rogermoorepoet.com/2016/04/27/alebrijes/

Click on this link for Roger’s reading.
Alebrijes

Le Mot Juste

Danzante
dancing with joy!

Le mot juste

Searching for what exactly?
For the exact word, le mot juste,
the word that sums it all up,
catches the essence of the thing
and holds it in the mind forever.

Le mot juste? Think color.
Think color blind. Think blind.
Think of the world we see
reduced to grey scale.
Think of the seven colors
that stripe the rainbow sky,
each with a unique name:
it seems so easy, so simple.

But the world has changed.
Think now of the computer,
its screen more accurate
than the human eye and color
coordinated by a million or more
tiny little pixels that multiply
the seven rainbow colors
by a million or two and every
color numbered beyond
the recognition point
of the human eye: le mot juste
reduced to precision of number.

Think flowers. Think scent.
Think of the limited ways
we describe the smell of things.

I look across the breakfast table
and see my wife of fifty years,
a teenager reborn, walking into
the café where we first met.
I search my memory and my mind
for the words to describe that beauty,
that surge of excitement,
but I cannot find les mots justes.

Click on link for Roger’s reading
Le mot juste

Sea Shore Poems 2

Whitecaps

… white-capped the waves,
pushed inland by a strong,
warmth-bearing wind, and hazy
the crazy paving sky, with its
cloud figments floating,
lazy, the heat, with summer’s
heavy hand now sudden upon
sea and land, wave upon wave,
this heat wave, holding us now,
as wind tied, the tide, strives to flee
but cannot free itself from wind grip,
and bit between teeth, white horses
cap the waves, leave seaweed
stranded high and dry in fierce sun,
Irish Moss and Madcap Dulse,
their iodine tang fulfilled on chance
winds that blow us willy-nilly, this way,
that way, any way the wind blows …

Click below for Roger’ reading.

Whitecaps

Sea Shore Poems 1

Words
Poems from the Sea Shore

Here, on the seashore,
the whisper of waves,
splashed with a flash of sun,
wind fingering the hair,
the light a delight,
and wordless this world
though its beauty be
configured in words.

The scything of the sea,
the land seized in snippets,
grey stones, red rocks,
gelatinous mudflats,
blue on white striations.

Seagull wings
snipping celestial ribbons,
salt caked keen on lips,
sea weed scents sensed
yet never seen.

Captivated we stand here,
unattached our single wings,
save to this singular beauty:
peregrine, the falcon soul,
so solitary as it soars.

Click on the link below for Roger’s reading.

Words

My First Thanksgiving

My First Thanksgiving

For the first twenty-two years of my life
Thanksgiving held no meaning, no life,
no substance, no form, nothing familiar,
nothing special to hold my attention.

When I emigrated to Canada
my cousins changed all that
with an invitation to visit them
in Kincardine for Thanksgiving.

Turkey on the table, colored
table napkins, and a family gathered,
arms outstretched, to make me welcome.

We were all surprised at how alike we looked.
“Like Cousin George, in Vancouver,” they said.
“Like Cousin Elsie in Revelstoke.”
“Like my mother’s mother, back home
in Swansea,” I said.

They told me how the Second World War
had brought the family back together
on these special holidays:
Christmas in Wales for the Canadian boys
or Thanksgiving in Winnipeg
for the Welsh boys learning to fly.

That Thanksgiving, the old family names
turned to photographs: snaps of my mother’s wedding,
my grandmother holding me, age three, on her knee.

And finally, as a special Thanksgiving gift,
a long-distance call to Britain and Clare
on the telephone saying
“Yes,” she would come to Canada,
and “yes,” she would marry me.

And I remember crying all the way
from Kincardine to Toronto,
and that was my first Thanksgiving in Canada.

Comment: A Golden Oldie, indeed. This poem is from my collection Secret Gardens. The secret love poems I write to Clare. It was published on our Silver Wedding Anniversary, 24 December 1991. It is a pleasure to re-publish it here for Thanksgiving, 2021. Now what am I going to do for 24 December 2021?

Click on the link below for Roger’s reading.

My First Thanksgiving

Push to Shove

Meditations on Messiaen
Why do the people?

3

Push to Shove

When push comes to shove, who stands
at one end of the gangplank, who at the other,
the shipboard one with a gun or a cutlass,
the other poised above circling sharks,
their grey triangular mini-sails threatening.

Can you hear the siren song emerging from
Davey Jones, waiting below, his locker door
open, as it has been so often before? Is this
fate or a fait accompli? Don’t ask me.

Let’s leave him there, the condemned man,
walking his plank, tied blindfold to his stake, seated
before the firing squad, standing on the crossing,
not quite ready to dance on a rope’s end, or riding
the tumbril to La Place de la Bastille, carrying
the time-bomb candle that will light him to bed.

Waiting, waiting, like them, we are all of us waiting,
in media res, waiting for push to come to shove.

Click on the link below for Roger’s reading.

Push to Shove

And every valley

Meditations on Messiaen
Revelations

5

And Every Valley

And every valley shall be filled with coal.
And the miners will mine, growing old
before their time, with pneumoconiosis
a constant companion, and that dark spot
on the grey slide of the sidewalk a mining
souvenir coughed up from the depths
of lungs that so seldom saw the sun
and soaked themselves in the black dust
that cluttered, clogged, bent and twisted
those beautiful young bodies into ageing,
pipe-cleaner shapes, yellowed and inked
with nicotine and sorrows buried so deep,
a thousand, two thousand feet deep down,
and often so far out to sea that loved ones
knew their loved ones would never see
the white handkerchiefs waved, never
in surrender but in a butterfly prayer,
an offering, and a blessing that their men
would survive the shift and come back
to the surface and live again amidst family
and friends and always the fear, the pinched
-face, livid, living fear that such an ending
might never be the one on offer, but rather
the grimmer end of gas, or flame, or collapse,
with the pit wheels stopped, and the sirens
blaring, and the black crowds gathering, and
no canaries, no miners, singing in their cages.

Click on the link below for Roger’s reading.

And every valley