in parentheses

Daniel Thomas Moran, born in New York City in 1957, is the author of sixteen collections of poetry. “In the Kingdom of Autumn”, was published by Salmon Poetry in Ireland in 2020. He is formerly poet laureate of Suffolk County, NY.

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The Baby and the Vermeer

The ship was deep into
the savage North Atlantic
when the alarm sounded.
The defiant flames in the boiler
room, already beyond remedy.
The call across the main deck,
and the call down below, was
to abandon ship.

As the mass of the liner fought
to straddle the billowing seas,
her lifeboats began to first fill
with the women and children.

Among the panicked humanity,
a Johannes Vermeer destined for
the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
The man who clutched it
approached the lifeboat
and sought to climb aboard.

It would be either the gentleman
clutching Lady Writing a Letter, or
the young woman with the baby,
who would be recalled in accounts,
as the very last to be saved from the
salt-sprayed depths that terrible day.

The frantic gentleman
stepped forward and held
that tender painting aloft.
Then the baby cried.

The Man Who Lives in My Bathroom Mirror

There’s a
weight in my feet,
and years
in my mirror.

That fleck
in my distance
draws me
ever nearer.

A re-
flection defied
begins
to now bother,

In this
garish light I
become
my father.

Weezie

To celebrate being
one hundred one, Weezie
went up the mountain.

She brought with her a
daughter, and her daughter,
and her daughter as well,
Just to have a last long look
into her familiar distances,
Gazing with her worn
blues eyes, and all the
blue eyes she had nurtured.

The July day
they told her that her
heart was nearly done,
Weezie was alright with it.
She being a woman to whom
life had brought many gifts,
and many hours to count.

The days passed, and she
confided she was just
a little bit surprised, that
death was taking so long
to reach its destination.

It was in a summer twilight,
after a contented meal, that
she nudged her fork into
the ambrosial tenderness of her
portion of cake remarking,
I think I will save the rest
for tomorrow, and she
slid the plate it aside.

That evening,
with the weary chambers
of her heart full and beating,
Weezie took to her bed,
Laying her head upon it
for the final time,
the sweetness of living
still on her lips.

Christmas under the Rubble

And so it was written,
that the bombs fell and fell
on the land of Palestine, the
footsteps of The Prince of Peace,
crushed into the sacred dust.

No wisemen to bestow devotions
on the babies and the mothers, the
angels fast asleep in the wilderness,
the scions of King David were left
to chant their entreaties to heaven
and reload their guns.

Five Questions

Why are you smiling ?
she asked.
I am smiling
at the daybreak.

Why are you singing?
she asked.
I am singing
to the garden.

Why are you dancing?
she asked.
I am dancing
with the new breeze.

Why are you writing?
she asked.
I am writing
the strains of mortality.

Why are you weeping?
she asked.
I am weeping
for everything else.

Paris

At six a.m.
Eiffel’s Tower is dark,

The garlic of
last night’s escargot
still lies on my tongue.

It should
never rain in Paris,
yet it is raining,

The morning’s
image drips in
the dim lights.

From this
high window on
the seventeenth floor,
all is anticipation.

The dark boulevards
of this City of Light,
whose names I will
never come to know,

Reach out for the
promises of a rising day.

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