5 Poems and Visual Art – Moira J. Saucer

The Gift Unseen

I spent my life reaching for the brass ring
Whirling around and around on the carousel
Without knowing I held a golden ring,
A bright, singing invisible thing
That in constant rhythm rose and fell.

Passage Abroad

Before I sleep, a window opens
On another world,
And my eyes are a young woman’s
And my hand is lifting to wave
Lightly at someone left on shore.
Who is she? I don’t know,
Maybe an unborn daughter,
Who sees this heavy grief of snow
And thinks herself unready for passage,
Preferring her inward sleep,
Her passport unstamped.

If she were alive,
We would travel together,
Myself years less agile against her step,
Closer to death and the remarkable trees:
My bones’ tentative loan,
Their brittle burdened limbs,
Balanced, we hold close,
Radiant and silent as snow,
The geometry of life
hidden, chilly matter.

To my Mother

You lay abed
That early morning
Weeping a lake of tears
Around your bed.
I imagined myself a swan,
Gliding gently and whitely
Towards you.
I whispered in the swan’s speech,
A whisper only you could hear.
Your eyes remained shut;
Oh your mouth
A kind of smile
Was floating.

Power Box, Rural Alabama

No Matter

On week-ends my father sat easy,
stuffing Dutch tobacco in a pipe bowl,
talking of other worlds.
Certainly God who is a master engineer
isn’t so limited
to make only us.
His big mind would create
lots of worlds.

Together we watched science
fiction on late night television.
One week the world was blown up.
Several people survived
but were hard put
to know what to do.

We went outside and father pointed
out the nearest star.
We aren’t the only ones.
Anyway, if we go
It will be mankind’s doing.
It will be over fast.

I shut my eyes.
One day the world would resemble
that rotting egg I had seen
in an alley overcome by maggots.
I imagined another world
where nobody talked.
Everything was understood.
Easily.

Thracian Women

Among our stones and riverweeds
The severed head of Orpheus
Unburdened sings last words of her,
Euridice, unknown to us and dead.

Was looking back before he should,
a lack of faith or merely doubt?
Yes, he entranced the dead,
but tried to shun the hero’s place.

Our silken gowns, our perfumes and flowers,
Our pleasures he refused for days.
That Orpheus, disheartened man,
returned to sing but of hell’s ways.

To show the singer Orpheus our strength
I threw the javelin first.
But spears and stones fell short of him,
and only hands could stop his dirge.

Again his mouth begins to move,
words beyond our grasp,
the shapely head sings on and on,
its hair now matted in the grass.

Your lips, your breasts, your wounded foot,
Euridice, I see you now,
the female world where your body dwells
now mine, the cavernous walls of hell.

We had a perfect right to him,
A man arousing all of Nature.
He’s nothing now but scraps and bones.
The current will drag him to Libethra.

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Moira J Saucer is a disabled poet and visual artist living in the Alabama Wiregrass and is managing editor of Ice Floe Press. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Her worked has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada including Black Bough Poetry, Burning House the Freedom Rapture anthology (Sidhe Press), Visual Verse, Fly on the Wall Press, Ice Floe Press, Mooky Chick, Floodlight Editions, and Fevers of the Mind Poets of 2020. Moira’s debut chapbook Wiregrass (Ethel Press. 2023) is available for purchase at: https://www.ethelzine.com/wiregrass. She is on various social media apps.

The art works in this feature are all by Moira J. Saucer, and use a variety of mediums (Acrylic, pastels, oil based paints, photo). (c) 2022/2024.