Jacqueline “Jackie” Moore

PORTLAND – Surrounded by loving friends, Jacqueline “Jackie” Moore died peacefully on June 16, 2023, at the age of 96.

Born to Dorothea Holly and Gerald Moore, Jackie was raised in Greenwich Village, N.Y. She graduated from Hunter College with a degree in English and earned a Fulbright Scholarship to teach American literature in London. She met her husband, Polish philosopher, Henryk Skolimowski, which begat many trips between the United States and Warsaw. She divorced Henryk in 1976 and began to write poetry as a way to strengthen her to move on.

And write she did! Jackie worked as an educator, tech programmer, and researcher, but her greatest passion was writing poetry. Beginning at the age of 5, Jackie spent summers at her Aunt Jac’s house in Searsmont (Mary Jacqueline Bragdon), always the inspiration for her life. After her aunt’s death, Jackie continued coming to her house in summers, looked after by many kind people of Searsmont and Morrill, as she hauled water, gardened, studied, and wrote poetry.

While working for the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, Jackie befriended Seamus Heaney, famous Irish poet, who encouraged her to write about her experiences living in the Maine woods. Her book “Living Tilted” (Maine Authors Publishing and Cooperative, 2016), describes the intimacy of living in her beloved old house for many decades (poem by same name):

In the dark my feet know

every rise and every fall,

every generation of warp and

knot eye.

In later years, increasingly alarmed about climate change, Jackie created a compilation of “eco” poems entitled “Chasing The Grass”, published by Littoral Books (2019). Here is a stanza from her poem entitled “Peaceable Kingdom”:

Hummingbird,

that blue-green-blue

iridescence

down curving

its bill

into sweetness, hovering

in that jungle

moment

before the cloudburst

and bulldozers

crawl all over the land.

Jackie combined a sharp wit and keen intelligence with a loving sensitivity towards nature and people. In one of the last poems she wrote “Spinning with the Light”, she describes women finding their way in the world, aptly describing her approach to life: It’s about being in the world and spinning in the light.

Her friends would like to thank the staff at Fallbrook Woods and Northern Lights Hospice, Portland, for the care they provided Jackie in the last months of her life, offering her the calm, peace, and dignity she needed to move on to her new life.