George Moore


After Afghanistan

Don’t fear there will be other wars 
and some more worldly and all-consuming 

wars between the races although there is only one
wars between the ruling classes and the workers 

now the billionaires and StarBuccaneers 
wars between men and women

and those for simple ownership and control
of oil and gold and territories once considered empty 

There will be a flood of humanity in new refugees
and the displaced will replace the displaced of previous wars

and anyone simply trying to get home
will be lost in this new world

There will be new deserts and dead Buddhas
around the world and they will

burn in squares or turn to dust in bullet fire
or their faces will be removed 

and all in the name of some missing god 
or gob or glob or possibly goober 

But do not despair 
the end is nowhere near

there are centuries of cruelty to come
Starvation and waterboarding are but a touch

of the sacred stone that falls on the other
and what remains are years of incursions and corruptions 

of hard booze by the case and cheap peanut butter at the PX
and out of this a world still to be born



Killing

Each death by another hand
lessens the density of the world

by two or more the multiples of two
and it is not a simple mathematics

Retaliation is in multiples of four
this world that world 

his world and hers
Let’s get personal

killing is an act that disengages the world
separates the body from its fact

the inner from the outer now
open as an accident in the world

But killing kills the body inwardly
from the hand that holds the gun

to the heart that pumps out hate
to the blindness of the one 

seeing nothing of the other
The stars teach us that killing is a catastrophe

the first blood came only after volcanos
heated the seas and created enemies

one-celled creatures
only for as long as they lived

Until the invention of the noose
the guillotine and the chair

Those who die in their sleep
are merely shadows of a reprieve

I want to bring back the butterfly 
in my ammonia jar

the pin used to tack it to the board
and the moment that pin pricked my finger



A Mind for Poetry

Like waiting for a train
in an vacant station

and then one cruises through
at full speed and disappears

and you stand there with your mouth open
on a word 

waiting for the steam to clear
and realize in the smell of oil and grease

that you have been here before
in another’s life with another’s eye

in what looks like a Victorian village
with cobbled streets and thatched roofs

with a poet standing at every window
or huddled by a dying fire

or hiding in the attics silently
reading verses frail as burnt linen

or sharp as a needle in an opium dream
and you realize a dozen trains

have passed you by
and yet you are full of wonder

like a child again 
traveling into a new century



Curry

Curry of potatoes rice and dal
curry smelling in the hair and skin

curry green as dawn light and then
morning and the stomach singing rude songs 

you’ve heard a thousand time but do not know
This infinite northern plain across which trains 

creep like insects switching gauges and rails 
to stop uprisings that happened twenty-five years before

and now fifty years more 
and latrine holes in concrete floors

and the markets with their peppers bright green
and the stain on the walls cooking on the street

the mud of curry and brown rice and cumin 
fennel with tamarind and coconut milk

and then everyone riding 
high on the train carriage tops

dangling my feet off the steel stairs
on the milk run through barley fields

and the slow sound of the ancient clock
the clack clack clack of the rails

If you are here a few weeks you hate it
if you stay six months you will never leave

Curry in the blood and northern air
a thousand years of an incomplete cycle

the river keeping secret its time and carrying the dead
the children running along side 

curry and naan and over sweet tea 
and surviving simply to be born again 



Detective Stories

To waste the time until I die 
I read these plot-heavy little tomes 

paperbacks the word itself a sign 
of the quick and the dead

How the weak are blessed and the evil destroyed
by an individual who solves each hidden crime

by a turn of mind like we were pieces on a board
which board I cannot recall but one

on the steps of a stupa in Durbar Square 
where the stupas were red wood faded 

to the flavor of old blood 
Can you recall the girl with emerald eyes 

they were selling or was she herself 
in the attitude of the old Hindu gods 

captured in the exotic carvings with their monster heads 
on bodies wild in dangerous Tantras 

or perhaps the crippled guy 
no one would say handicapped then

the way he rolled himself along on dolly casters
for he wanted to be seen in all his glory

touched by the gods and left to view the human world
from below its crowded surfaces 

And reading and growing older by the day 
I rested in the Archives 

high in the Himalayans 
waiting for the truth to change

inside of me bowing as I passed each red-robed monk
mumbling on his swinging wheel 

or popping beads between his fingers
there in exile from Lhasa and the Chinese

as we gathered round the grand young man 
rushing by in his Mercedes with two giant Sikh guards

Somewhere in here is a line about the purpose of things
saved from a time that went all too fast 

and I sit back and read it out again
but my mind is somewhere fifty years ago in the East

George Moore’s recent collections include Children’s Drawings of the Universe (Salmon Poetry 2015) and Saint Agnes Outside the Walls (FutureCycle 2016). He has published poetry in The Atlantic, Poetry, Arc, North American Review, Stand, and Orion. Nominated for seven Pushcart Prizes and a finalist for The National Poetry Series, he presently lives on the south shore of Nova Scotia.

 
 

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