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Volume 12 • Number 2 • Fall - Winter 2020

George Moore

Bread and Wine

The consecration a burning desire
to put back time, re-gear it

toward another future
one where the house does not burn

to the ground and the ground
does not quiver in this destruction

and the seedlings do not sprout
out of the forest fire out of the house

cracks and creases and the clock
does not melt or tick or turn

its hands like needles
of the giant Ponderosa

and the land returns to its unscarred self
before the builders buried their knives

and the masons filled the rabbit hole
and the ground was beautifully uneven

and there in the sacrament
in the bread and the wine

the land is the table
the house a moment in time

when sacrifice means nothing
and the body sways in the wind

and the hour is born anew
and we build and building

is the only good thing
for our fallen table

George Moore’s recent collections include Children's Drawings of the Universe (Salmon Poetry 2015) and Saint Agnes Outside the Walls (FutureCycle 2016). Poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, Orion, Arc, Colorado Review, and Stand. He is a six time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Bailieborough Poetry Prize and long-listed for the Gregory O'Donoghue Poetry Prize and the Ginkgo Prize. After teaching with the University of Colorado, Boulder, he now lives on the south shore of Nova Scotia.