What Rough Beast | Poem for December 15, 2017

Daniel Edward Moore
Titanic Me

Frigid explanations
heaved bodies off his tongue.
A four year plan to Titanic the heart,
like steel under water, like his iceberg hand, gloveless and loveless,
saying, worship me under a casket of stars for planting the earth with souls.

As the unsinkable us
crumbled with fear chilling
pink champagne in lifeboats of lies, frozen children
backstroked in time, in uterine dreams of breaths never taken.
“Should I have saved them,” the iceberg said, little seals gasping at winter’s bright moon?

What the glacial President wanted to hear, the orchestra yielded to the deep.

 

Daniel Edward Moore’s poems have appeared in The Spoon River Poetry Review, Rattle, Assaracus, Columbia Journal, American Literary Review, Western Humanities Review, Mid-American Review and other journals, as well as in the anthology This New Breed: Gents, Bad Boys, And Barbarians 2 (Body Electric, 2004), edited by Rudy Kikel. He lives in Washington State on Whidbey Island.

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