Lenard D. Moore is the Founder and Executive Director of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective and Co-founder of the Washington Street Writers Group. Moore’s poems, essays and reviews have appeared in Agni, Callaloo, African American Review, Colorado Review, North Dakota Quarterly and Crab Orchard Review. His poetry appeared in over forty anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008), The Haiku Anthology (Norton, 1999); Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African American Poetry (Mentor Books, 1997); The Garden Thrives: Twentieth Century African American Poetry (HarperCollins, 1996); and Heiwa: Peace Poetry in English and Japanese (U of Hawaii P, 1995). He is the author of The Open Eye (NC Haiku Society Press, 1985), Forever Home (St. Andrews College Press, 1992), Desert Storm: A Brief History (Los Hombres Press, 1993) and A Temple Looming (WordTech Editions, 2008). Moore has been featured on the TBS Documentary Spirit of the Ark and the radio program “Voice of America.” He is former President of the Haiku Society of America (2008 and 2009) and Executive Chairman of the North Carolina Haiku Society. Moore teaches at Mount Olive College, where he directs the literary festival and advises The Trojan Voices. ---------
At the Train Stop
I imagine the quick hand:
Thelonious Monk waves
at red, orange, yellow leaves
from Raleigh to Rocky Mount.
Alone in this seat,
I peer out the half-window
at the rainbow of faces
bent toward this train
that runs to the irresistible Apple.
My determination to imagine Monk
glows like Carolina sun
in cloudless blue sky.
I try so hard to picture him
until his specter hunkers
at the ghost piano, foxfire
on concrete platform.
Now I can hear the tune “Misterioso”
float on sunlit air.
If notes were visible,
perhaps they would drift crimson,
shimmer like autumn leaves.
A haunting hunch shudders
into evening, a wordless flight.
Raven Hue
for Meg Kearney
In front of black velvet drapes,
Meg reads her poems.
Her hair, sunset-red,
radiates.
We become bathers.
Her words wash us whole,
astute in tone
as her blue denim dress.
She soars, the poem.
Raven rises,
flutters syllables,
a beak of swooping metaphor.