James Moore Poet Narrative

Notes About The Poem

Enlightenment; East and West

(“Before the Door”, 2023, original encaustic)

There is no transcendent ethos in mainstream West
The enlightenment in the West was 
A mere mental liberation from superstition
With the dawning of science
And yet with this science has come
An age of both reason
And health and wealth, 
Communication and transportation;
A physical bloom of hope and prosperity,
And yet an ever increasing spiritual void.

Transcendence flourished in the East
Because it had no science to assuage the suffering.

It’s as simple as that, 
And that simple fact 
Makes all the difference even today.
Hard times make tough men
And tough men then create softer times
Until inadvertently all that remain
Are the soft and weak.
And with their corruption
Hard times come again.

Again and again, the cycle turns
Which is why transcendence becomes a value.
But the West is young, adolescent and brash
Full of arrogance that good times
Are what we must deserve
Since we have them
Unwilling to see 
That everything passes through our hands
Eventually.

And what comes next to such adolescence?
An unknown, filled with the risks of the unknown
Suicide or maturation and a life
Of family, birth, aging, sickness and death,
And transcendence
To those who look
And so do find.

It’s waiting there after all
Ever patient, ever kind.

(12/28/25)

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