TWO NEW POEMS BY A. F. MORITZ

When I Was a Child

When I was a child it was clear

the stones are alive. Plunging in tall grasses,

almost lost to each other, we always

were meeting them in the new trails

each of us crushed, invisible to one another

but near, calling out, smelling the faint

sweetness in the afternoon drift of light. A stone

was no companionable creature like the wary

groundhog or blue jay watching us calmly far off,

the impassible grasshopper caught, waiting, staring

on our palms. The stones live another way, all stones

the same stone life, so strange—the dark ones, wet,

we stood on in the creek, the sandy ones

we tried to hurl across, the ones that hurt me,

the sandstone cliff, its tilted narrow path

of smooth stone where one day I slid and fell.

The learning of the life of stones

goes on. Later I’ve met

faint images of it flickering

in ideas: the hierarchy

of spirit; the physics of

tiny worlds—grains that wander

separate, each one chained down

to every other. No matter

where they lie or travel, each blown mote

an imperial center

never to be moved. I’ve admired

these poignant speculations, poor

forays into the first beaches

and forest fringes of

back when I was a child

and it was clear

the stones are alive.

This Is You

As the city spreads and closes in,

the only things left living

are humans. And these diminish

to nothing but gestures they still can make

themselves make. People who don’t exist,

not so much as in the mind’s wish,

the heart’s imagination, let alone on earth,

until they lift a finger by a labor of

the will. People only there

from the moment they wave a hand

they decide to lift to greet

the nonexistent others. Others like flashes,

like scarce motions of air. Others unknown

until a wave salutes them. Not here

until with a motion of salutation

they were sketched. Then from less than ashes

they get up, fill themselves in,

and live.

Looking around, they find themselves

torn between gratitude and horror.

There still is a world. This one, hidden

in the material city spreading wide,

closing in. This is you, crushed

field of faint gestures to things—motions—

infinite as a stirring too tiny,

too stifled, to be heard—bodies

that are names only

just now being made up, never yet said.

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A. F. Moritz’s most recent books are The Garden: a poem and an essay (2021), As Far As You
Know (2020), and The Sparrow: Selected Poems (2018), with Great Silent Ballad forthcoming in
fall 2024. His poetry has received the Guggenheim Fellowship; inclusion in the Princeton Series
of Contemporary Poets; the Ingram Merrill Fellowship; the Award in Literature of the American
Academy of Arts and Letters; the Beth Hokin Prize of Poetry magazine; and the Griffin Poetry
Prize, among others. Three of his books have been finalists for the Governor General’s Award in
poetry, Canada’s national arts award. His poems have been translated into many languages,
including selected poems volumes in Spanish and Greek.