Lions and Doves

Our first video in this post arose from the poem “Sketching the Assyrian Reliefs, with My Wife, at the British Museum.”  Let me just say that
each time Dan and I stand before those ancient lion-hunt friezes, we wonder: How could an artist have sculpted these exquisitely sensitive images
of such a brutal ritual of slaughter? This paradox says so much about that haunting dichotomy of human nature.

I chose the second poem for our companion video before fully realizing how much it balanced the violent mood of Assyrian Lions. In his
“Moore’s Doves” piece Dan sees some local birds in a fresh light after contemplating Henry Moore’s sculptures — bringing to mind Oscar Wilde’s
quip that “nature imitates art.” And isn't it true that what we perceive in art museums so often influences our vision of the natural world?
Another paradox in our human experience . . .                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    — Suzanne
                                                                                                                                               


"Sketching the Assyrian Reliefs, with My Wife, at the British Museum"
                                                                                                                           

"Moore's Doves"
                                                                                           

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                                Sketching the Assyrian Reliefs, with

                                   My Wife, at the British Museum

                                         

                                    Were it not mere alabaster, hewn

                                      the better portion of 3000

                                        civilizing years, the Dying Lioness

                                         of Nimrud, writhing in the grey

                                          spew of an archer’s flank-sprung

                                           shaft, would continue,

                                             year on year, to writhe

                                              on the black friezes

                                                of tossed sleep, to nudge

                                                 with her bruised snout

                                                   and dark closed eyes

                                                    into our dreams, like

                                                      painful words

                                                       that sputter eons to rekindle

                                                        in the corners of

                                                         the mind, like hunters’ fires

                                                          verging on our harmless

                                                           seekers’ lives — stalking

                                                            the beautiful, found rarely,

                                                             never uncombined

                                                              with pain.

                   Moore’s Doves

                                   IN MEM. Henry Moore (1898-1986)

         Soft sculpture of the morning.  Sunlight rose on their swollen breasts,

                  where they roost on the hard blackness of the power

                        lines.  Coo gently as we pace upon our 

          early walk, beneath.  Who says an artist's vision, true enough,

                 can't change the living world — the way, forever after,

                        that we see: merging craft with blood's

          warm living pulse?  Round soft breasts, like Moore’s globed forms,

                 against the rising light.  Or like Cycladic women, small

                       heads & rounded bosoms — tiny fecund

          sculpture, in glass cases, that he surely saw, as we had, in the British

                 Museum halls.  And thought, as we, how they’d reminded

                       him — beyond their ancient lore — of sun-tinged

          hills / or the soft breasts of cooing doves / before the rush of day.


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*“Sketching the Assyrian Reliefs, with / My Wife, at the British Museum” first appeared in the literary journal, Epoch (Cornell University Press), and later in Dan’s
first full-length volume of poems, The Artist and the Crow (Purdue University Press)  //  “Moore’s Doves” first appeared in the final issue of the Massachusetts journal 
Diner, and was later reprinted in the International Poetry Review (UNC, Greensboro) in its original form.  This revised version will appear, alongside “Assyrian Reliefs,”
 in Back to the Source: Selected Poems & Parables [San Francisco Bay Press, 2018].