Title: Coming of Age
Artist: Greggory Moore
Medium: Poetry
exhibit b
Except for his first two years of life (in Ohio) and a much later four-month jag (in Comoros, a third-worldy island nation in the Indian Ocean between southern Africa and Madagascar), Greggory Moore is a lifelong Southern California resident, including the last dozen years in a historical landmark in downtown Long Beach. During that time he’s done various things with words, including for the Los Angeles Times, OC Weekly, The District Weekly, and Daily Kos. Currently he’s the theatre critic for Random Lengths News. His first novel, The Use of Regret, was published in 2012.
artist statement
Responding to: “Refinery” by G. Murray Thomas
I submitted my poem, “Coming of Age”, in response to G. Murray Thomas’s poem “Refinery”—specifically, the last five lines:
The sight of death
fascinates;
it doesn’t matter if the death
is sudden
or very, very slow
I don’t know whether we actually have souls, but at the very least there’s metaphoric value in saying that some things seem to resonate at the level of the soul. That seems to be the case with me vis-à-vis death. I have always been preoccupied with death—or more particularly, impermanence and the fact that anything can be snatched away from us at any time—despite my having no experience whatsoever with losing anyone to whom I felt close or who was a regular part of my life until I was in my 40s. There is simply a resonance there.
Anyway, although Murray’s poem isn’t especially about death (despite those last lines), as soon as I read them I was put in mind of “Coming of Age”, which is obviously about the slow coming of my father’s death.
Click the orange box to read thoughts on this work from our team.
