Striving for Day

By Herschel E. Moore

Poems and Essays of Today's Disappointments and Aspirations

• Language: English
• Publisher: HEM BOOKS
• Release date: Jan 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393394327

Book preview

Cover Photo

By Harvey Warren

Striving for Day

Poems and Essays

By Herschel E. Moore

PREFACE

When we were very young, my brother Tom kept a notebook in which he copied poems and wrote some of his own. We played a game called Authors using cards with writers’ pictures and titles of some of their works: Sir Walter Scott with Ivanhoe. Shakespeare with The Tempest. Longfellow with Evangeline. Our older siblings read novels to us as we sat around our mother at her sewing machine or ironing board. At the slightest prompt, our father could quote poetry or a line from Shakespeare or the Bible. At bedtime, Dad would announce, Well, let’s read a chapter and go to bed. He meant a chapter from the Bible. All this, I finally recognize, was the seedbed of my interest in literature and theology.

From this account, one might think ours was a highly educated household, and it was. But not in the conventional sense. Our parents had the tenth-grade educations required for a high school diploma in their day, and our mother had also earned a teaching certificate from a two-year normal school, as teacher’s colleges were called. That was the extent of their formal education. Yet it seems to me that their knowledge of history, civics, geography, vocabulary, and literature was greater than that of many college graduates of today. You could say they were self-educated. They valued learning and never stopped. What follows in this book is a bit of what has evolved from that rich childhood.

I am indebted to my beloved wife for her reading and commenting on the manuscript. Sometimes I listened; most times I should have.

HEM

CONTENTS

Photo Credit         2

Title Page         3

Preface         4

Contents         5

POEMS         6

A MURMURATION        7

EDGES          8

THE LETHAL NEEDLE       9

KILLING THUMPER’S MOM       10

WIND AND WILL        11

REPENTANCE        13

ENGINES         14

REVERIE GARDEN        15

A SONG OF GRIEF AND FAITH      17

WHOSE EYES?        19

A PICTURE OF THE OCEAN       21

A CLERIC CONTEMPLATES       22

INSIGHT AND OUTSIGHT       23

A SONG FOR MARK        24

AMIGITO         25

BORN