Sample Poems by Julie L. Moore

Becoming
 
Spring-thick with snowy
blossoms, the ornamental
 
pear tree slowly slips
out of bloom, sloughing off
 
petal by skin-soft petal, bleeding
green as leaf after spear-
 
like leaf thrusts through,
laying down one life
 
for another.  How
willingly it becomes
 
and becomes.

Apparition
 
Only in mist do they emerge,
does sweeping over soy
young in rain-soft fields,
leaping from loam
to shadow-dark loam
over barbed wire fences
with the same ease
of any ghost-white mare,
drawing closer to their fawns
in the protective folds of fog.
They are five or six
congregating by the stream,
hard to know for sure this mystical
morning as their forms
like phantoms
blur between earth
and air.

Purple Bead
 
My daughter works
grace into a bracelet of beads,
pink, green, purple—
the purple a must since
it’s her friend’s favorite color—
and the appropriate initials in the center,
jewelry for a birthday present
at a party she’s been invited to,
perhaps by accident.
 
The birthday girl called someone else
to invite her, and Ashley happened to be there.
The birthday girl last year had given
all the girls in class friendship bracelets,
all but my daughter.
 
So here’s the picture:
Ashley stringing beads,
me wanting to attach a note,
“For the friendship bracelet you
didn’t give me,”
she far more forgiving,
adding another purple bead.