"Animal World" by George Moore from MAGAZINE1

Today's poem is by George Moore

Animal World
The culturally constructed aesthetic ideal of the natural landscape
can never be preserved because the dynamism of ecological processes defies preservation.
R.P. Neumann

Things change, surely: you watch
them douse a whale in the surf,
bucket by bucket like firemen
out to save a child.
And I think at twelve
I watched Animal World,
men in canoes hunting an elusive alligator
and the world changing
slow in its currents
until suddenly,
the gators slap their tails
in the shadows of a draining swamp.
My neighbors, wolves,
wrestle with their closeness to the suburbs:
the one I raised refusing me,
loved me enough, ran
until he fell unfaltering in his tracks.
What is it in our everyday
that dwindles and dries up,
that gets blown to smithereens,
gets curled to butter
black with death?
Those bears on our hill
pull down birdfeeders each spring
like ornaments off a Christmas tree.
And this morning, a Mbojo lioness
catches three Maasai children
hunting cattle, and the cattle
wander home alone.

Copyright © 2025 George Moore All rights reserved
from Magazine1
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission

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