Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Monkey Temple: A Narrative Fable For Modern Times

Monkey Temple: A Narrative Fable For Modern Times

Moore, Roger

Paperback

General Poetry

ISBN10: 1537235621
ISBN13: 9781537235622
Publisher: Createspace
Published: Aug 22 2016
Pages: 86
Weight: 0.28
Height: 0.18 Width: 5.98 Depth: 9.02
Language: English
My visits to the Zoo always lead me to the Monkey Temple. It is an old, ruined, Indian Temple, half-hidden in the trees and populated by a colony of monkeys. Sometimes, the monkeys are playing in the open, sometimes they aren't. Patience is everything: sooner or later, the monkeys will appear, revealing themselves in all their splendor. I do not like to call these refuges from modern city life zoos; rather, I think of them in terms of nature reserves, preservation centers, museums, art galleries with living portraits, areas where human beings can break from the city's restlessness and come face to face with a tiny part of a lost natural world, a world which we are so busily destroying. Are monkeys people, you ask? Of course they aren't. But they do have human qualities and there is no better place to see these human qualities than in the Monkey Temple. Do animals accurately reflect human qualities? Of course they don't. The monkeys in the Monkey Temple are the distorting mirrors of fair ground, circus, and exhibition where bodies are fattened and flattened, thinned and skinned, turned inside out into falsified figures, stick creations bent out of woolly wires designed for cleaning pipes. Please be reassured: the poems in Monkey Temple do not refer to any specific monkey, living or dead. If you see an aspect of yourself, or myself, twisted beyond the norms of reality, do not fret: it is entirely accidental, taken from the monkeys themselves. Please remember the zoo's motto: Ask the animals: they will teach you. But, be warned: do not place your fingers too near the verses -- these monkey-poems bite.

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