New Poems

Poems by Albert Moritz and Peter Morris

Swan Song Books, 1974

from A Prison Diary

From the foundation
all night long the whimsical warden
kept us prisoners awake
with a rhythmic pounding on the pipes.
…
I remember how each dawn cut out
the old skyline of the yard:
the broken inverted eggshell over us
would gray, then fester to whiter light
and this brought out the forms, like bones
piled by chance the way clouds
suggest a human use: a tall
guillotine shaped like the letter A;
a gibbet with its dangling nose,
which seemed in imaginative moments
like a harness for a bird; a boiling
pot with its red emanation, and in
the background the cross against the sky.

In this book, Moritz’s Thirty-one Poems is printed in tandem with Peter Morris, Twenty-one Poems.  This title is out of print. However, Moritz’s pieces in New Poems are reprinted in Early Poems.