Child Down a Well
after Federico Garcia Lorca
Because we could not hold our breath any longer
the child disappears into the well
out of the brittle sunlight, into some fool’s hole
left uncovered. The earth eats all that stumbles
through its shadows and silhouettes, all the cures
for oneness, joining or finding or falling through.
Our lungs contract in fear for the darkness
and the earth grows smaller by each single falling meteor.
In Morocco, Little Julen, and Girija in India
down an abandoned borehole, an illegal search
for gold, or water, or what lies beneath in hell.
Lily Faith battling her City of Angels
or Baby Jessica falling finally through Texas
into Creation. What does the earth give back
to the forgetful, to the careless and unmindful?
What miracle saves us from ourselves then,
those small explorers of the darkness in us, first
discoveries, hidden goals, and what more
could be our reward than pulling her up
and finding them all still breathing?
Across the World
Some spirit old
has turned with maligned kiss
our lives to mould.
– Isaac Rosenberg, “On Receiving News of the War”
The other side the world we hear the news of war
but it is old news, old lies, older than the race.
The enemy has taken another town, another enclave,
and secured a section of the trembling earth
with wire and rubble, and precious bones,
and not remembered from where they came.
News comes to us by internet so fast it seems
we might be sleeping in a trench, believing
the mud we taste is theirs, but the lives lost ours.
The enemy’s mud is still there deep within us
and reflects another flash of artillery across
the screen, a distance real and make-believe
as texel images of smoke and sky, and the dead
who ask do you take cream. And sure as electricity
it’s a celebration of our humanity, love and death
and all the lessons of history, which we believed
as they believed in gods and nations and boundaries.
And all as we sip our tea and mouse our way
across a wasteland of pixelated dust
into another imaginary galaxy.
From Away
I live across the border
from my homeland,
across a great divide,
at times the gulf
of this other country
swallows me whole.
I watch and wait
for a break in history,
where dull clouds won’t gather.
But then again it rains.
I see children playing
and shooting themselves
in classrooms.
What can it mean?
I see it like the terrible
flight of a thousand birds.
Across from nowhere I see
is still nowhere.
Here, they tell me I’m
from away, meaning not local,
not a Nova grad, not one
of those propagating dozen names
born and raised
into a hundred faces
all similar, all seeing
which way the world leans.
I am nowhere then in particular,
across a border out of the fray.
But then what is the border
but a line dividing us and them,
a line drawn in the sand
with a sharp stick.
Nothing more.
I Think it is Impossible to Sleep
here with the others scattered around the floor
of a cottage on the northwest coast maybe forty
years ago. Why do I wake at night back in the cold
along the shoreline of Long Beach, an unknown
strip of wooded sand on the Washington coast?
All of us in our twenties and unbound, Prometheans,
breathing fire, finding in the moment a release,
just to be off campus and out of reach, to be
boundless somehow without knowing the future.
I think it is impossible to sleep when you see
the past too clearly, when life becomes a set of tracks
and the snow of the unmapped years is melting.
On the way home, half a dozen of us, more?
Who knows, there were so many there and gone.
On the way, a farm friends were rehabilitating,
growing vegetables like their ancient ancestors,
and sheep, those woolly monsters who would elude us,
the beasts we celebrated in our new liberty.
And now that farm seems almost a cliché.
But sleep is the river between cities and farms,
the current now that carries the dead to my door.
It is that river that cannot console me for losses
or for what is forgotten, light flashes off its surface.
I think it is impossible to sleep.
George Moore has published six collections , including Children’s Drawings of the Universe (Salmon Poetry 2015) and Saint Agnes Outside the Walls (Future Cycle 2016). He poetry has appeared in The Atlantic, New York Quarterly, Poetry, Valparaiso, Stand, Orbis, and North American Review. After years teaching literature and writing at the University of Colorado, Boulder, he now lives on the south shore of Nova Scotia with his wife, a Canadian writer.
