Poems

Find and share the perfect poems.

Shadow and Light

Richard O. Moore

Incised in concrete
knife-edged shadow
frond a perfect
arrest of clarity

a palm frond arrow
from a declining sun

shadow and light
lust of epiphany
the illusion that walks
with me on concrete

invisible come-along
shadow and light

epiphany of the shadow
tangible as light palm shape
holds me timeless until
without thinking I pass by

an arrest of clarity held
and released by a declining
sun : step over the shadow
light vanishes a passerby

From Writing the Silences (University of California Press, 2010) by Richard O. Moore. Copyright © 2010 by the Regents of the University of California. Used with permission of University of California Press Books.

Richard O. Moore was born in 1920 in Ohio. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he took poetry classes with Josephine Miles. In the late 1930s, Moore attended Kenneth Rexroth’s literary salons, referred to as “the Fridays,” at Rexroth’s home on Potrero Hill.

About Richard O. Moore

Themes

Sign up for Poem-a-Day

More by this poet

By the Lake

Past years are figures in old glass
wobbly in a lake
wrinkled by a stone.

The lake will settle down
a face will reappear
in a scent of evergreen.

Richard O. Moore

2010

Itinerary

Monologues of white interiors
time-dried of water and wind

crowds gather in history’s emptiness
weightless in the hollows of memory

description without witness
so long ago lost.

Richard O. Moore

2010

Utensils

An available palette thickened by air
words I hold and so fast lose.

A thunder so low     an inaudible present     its slow
cycles place me shaking in its throat.

Stare     and beauty opens like a work of fire
a made thing     a connection must be made.

This is to say necessity is a place made all of stares
come beauty     come the final ruin of the world. Stop   :

for what it may be     or was     a burned-in-after-flash of fire 
over distance measured light years. The glamour of it all.

Richard O. Moore

2010

Poems

Page submenu block

Shadow and Light

More by this poet

Newsletter Sign Up