Henry Moore (1898-1986)
He must have watched women from afar,
stretched on blankets in the park,
taking the sun on the beach,
lounging with coffee and a newspaper,
their bodies undulating like the West Riding.
They say women adored him—
Lauren Bacall, Sophia Loren,
his wife Irina, a beauty from Kiev—
at garden parties where guests
wandered the wide lawns of Hoglands
with strawberries and champagne.
He sculpted real women with breasts
and bellies pale as the full moon,
shoulders mounded in the dark.
No catwalk models with anorexic struts,
bones poking through silks, and the latest
mode of famished eyes, but females
reclining in their own fullness, smooth
as marble, dark as bronze,
their polished hips shining.
