THE SERPENT INK
HENRY MOSCOVITCH
© The Estate of Henry Moscovitch
Published by Poet’s Pulpit Press
at Smashwords
copyright © The Estate of Henry Moscovitch 2011
copyright © Poet’s Pulpit Press 2011
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Moscovitch, Henry, 1941-2004
The Serpent Ink / Henry Moscovitch
Whiteley, Robert, 1972-
Foreword / Robert Whiteley
ISBN: 978-0-9736817-2-7
1. Poetry, Canadian (English) 1. Title
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THE SEPENT INK
In every cry of every man,
In every infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind forg’d manacles I hear.
William Blake
FOR IRVING LAYTON
For Sarah Who Makes Defence Against Sex
On the Night Before a Birthday
Words of a Dissatisfied Flower
And though they be hid from My
sight in the bottom of the sea,
Thence will I command the serpent,
and he shall bite them,
Amos 9:3
Here are my poems. Read me.
Here is my body. See me.
Here is my soul. Remember me.
The words above weren’t written by Henry Moscovitch. They were written by me.
They were written by me because this is what I believe, this is what I feel Henry was trying to convey to his audience when he wrote his three books of poetry: The Serpent Ink (1956), The Laughing Storm (1961), New Poems (1982)
This is what I believe any poet sets out to accomplish when he or she sits down and struggles with the blank white page before them.
Some do it better than others while most are quickly forgotten.
And while it may seem unfair, to you the reader, to summarize a poet’s body of work with only a few lines, I hope once you have finished reading this book and have drawn your own conclusions that both you and I can agree that Henry Moscovitch deserves to be remembered.
Henry Moscovitch deserves to be “pulled back from the shadows”*
Originally published by Contact Press in 1956 when Henry was only 15 years old. I have tried to maintain the integrity of The Serpent Ink’s original publication. With the benefit of new technology I have corrected only a few spelling errors and when faced with a problem neither I, nor my computer could resolve, I have let the word stand as it was printed more than fifty years ago.
Robert Whiteley
October 20, 2011
* Told to me by one of Henry’s contemporaries while we were tie shopping in Toronto in 2007.
Carried past the open door
Seeping through a broken glass
With the cold night autumn air
Haunting wails of verse I hear.
Flashing down the black cat sky
Prelude of a coming blast
With the lightning darting fast
Contorted stanzas I have spied.
In all talk from day to day
From all sights that I have passed
From the khaki donkey’s bray
A rhythmic symbol I have made.
Let them name this river St. Henry,
after me,
and send their naked children
to bathe in it and be happy,
rinse their underwear in it
and throw their waste boldly