Yesterday I heard
your woodpecker at work: heard,
reading one of your stories,
what thirty years ago
you went through in prison.
Your woodpecker was drumming it
over and over. Did woodpeckers,
you wonder in your story,
invent morse code? Once heard
always heard, the tapped out
messages from your next-cell
neighbour and from you, from you.
Woodpeckers cling to the tree
of what really happened,
then lilt off and hammer it home
elsewhere. Soon through tree-shapes
not-you emerges and various
acquaintances of not-you.
~ Hubert Moore
Hubert Moore’s eighth full collection, ‘The Bright Gaze of the Disoriented’, was recently published by Shoestring Press. His poem, ‘Hosing down’, was a winner in the McLellan Competition (2013) and was short-listed for the Forward Prize. He was for nine years a writing mentor at ‘Freedom from Torture’.