Written 1967 and published in 'Purple Patch' 1993
Round, smooth, sinewy, full of holes,
The scupltures of Henry S. Moore
Recline in my mind
With the exactitude of a nightmare,
But only vaguely seen,
Frustratingly snatched at
Before they fade through the smoke of ages,
Back to the primitive gulf of stone,
When sex breathed in stone,
Palpitated with unknown forces
Of Lawrencian mystery,
Churned through the black loins of the core
Of origin,
Only to decay, fragment, fracture
Till Moore urges
His tingling fingers to fondle
The seething souces from form,
Till only Moore sees the core,
The essential key to the mystery of living.
Not created, behind the mask of rebellion,
Of automatic fumbling,
Of surly surrealistic brandishing of fear,
But spawning a chunk of rigid core
Out of the cortex,
Out of the nadir of civilisation,
And raising it to the zenith
Of clean, white swirls of chiselling,
Of edgy scraping of stone,
To upturn the nerves into aesthetic response;
And Moore
Is the core
Which obeys every law of nature,
And disobeys
Those God chose.
