Repainting his grandson, as if to tighten
the tourniquet against a lunatic amputation of

the heart, each canvas a beautiful new agony.
He stirs pigment, creates smooth brown skin

like wet pottery clay, his flat brush moving
over the bony crescent of a fingernail,

tiny hands that he is still holding,
then a tint to gentle eyes

that he never manages to recreate.
After the Haitian earthquake

this old man set up a makeshift easel,
shuffling between cinderblock piles,

reproducing the same face, over and over,
and hawking these portraits to aid workers.

One painting hangs in our own boy’s bedroom,
who now asks if the child was in our family.

I am reminded of a carved tablet cartouche
that bears the pharaoh’s royal name,

a stone shout into the fearful abyss
of love and forgetting.

About the Author:

Gerald Arthur (Art) Moore is an adventurer, a part-time university lecturer, a high school teacher, and a rugby coach living in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. NON-Publishing released his first book of poetry Shatter the Glass, Shards of Flame in 2018. He received the PubHouse Books Chapbook prize in 2019 for Trigger Fingers. His work has appeared in Queen’s Quarterly, Prairie Fire, Exile Quarterly, Vallum, The Antigonish Review, The Nashwaak Review, The Dalhousie Review, Qwerty, Off the Coast, The Pennysylvania Review, Boston Poetry Magazine, Quills, The Sandy River Review, The River, and The Military Review. Moore has led six humanitarian work projects to Haiti since the devastating earthquake there in 2010. His employment history includes army officer and vintner. His newest book is titled Flak Jacket 2024.