Mark A. Murphy’s first full length collection, Night-watch Man & Muse is due out in 2013 from Salmon Poetry (Eire). Murphy’s poems have been published in over 100 magazines and ezines world wide. He is the creator and editor of POETiCA.
All-Hallows-Even
I kneel by the window before dawn
in the silence of the in-between time.
I wear no mask nor costume,
nor do I blacken my face
as I consider what went before
and what is to come.
For no other reason than I love her
will I gaze at the moon and shadows
through the fog of my own mortality,
carving no ghostly lanterns –
only muteness out of the night air.
For this one night alone
I will discard all symbols for silence
for it is there where I will find you.
Blue November
Where has my Nora gone? I do not see her
in our white painted room where her crucifixes
hang above the bed. I do not see her
in the garden where the blue rhododendrons
clamour for light. Where is my only girl
who makes the moonlight my midnight friend?
In this pitch less room, I must wait
with the antique barometer, the dried out roses
and the porcelain angel for the common crow
to break the silence of my nightly vigil,
claim my fitful sleep, claim my broken schemes.
Blue was her dream, blue, always her colour
when she took handfuls of barbiturates,
when November rain returned with its idle words.
Listening to Brahms’ Lullaby
My love crosses the world alone,
a certain unmendable melancholy in her eyes.
She falls asleep on the plane
and in her dreams she plays Brahms’ Lullaby
on the piano –
the melody, deathly sweet.
I too play the Lullaby on the old gramophone,
the arpeggios lull me to sleep
where I dream of my love so far away,
I dream my own sweet death.
Now We are Stars
You are wanted by the heavens.
And I am a man in need of air –
who leaves twig and branch to despair
at the hardly hidden deceit of dreams
where we meet phantoms
in the tortured ether
unable to untie the mist, or decipher
the confessions of knives and kindness.
So we live in a winter of photographs
where every page might remember
the deeds and doings of last November
when I failed to call or wish
for us upon the escaping billion stars.
I interrupt Jesus mid-speech, begetter
of your bloody libretto and score
where you find nothing now matters.
So what is left, but sad partitions
in the clouds where lovers might deliver
the heartbreaking news to each other
that love does not care for gentleness.
Love is beyond what hunted dogs
and the mysterious river
may partially recall in the never
ending flood of lives lived below the bogs.
Wake, my love, wake with the sensations
of rain tickling your neck, next year
when we think of the star, Mintaka
in the belt of Orion, we shall remain nameless
to the millions that are yet faceless
in the womb of the earth-mother,
but it is not in doubt that their
dreams will come among us to undress
the dawn where we might confess
to the sparrow-hawk and the kestrel our
rancour at the killing and the killer
that would sorrow the mother in her nest.
Why do I write you? Hardly a day passes
when I do not bolt heavens’ door
on the earth and all its sores
and all that binds the mud and ties us.
We are children now, defenceless
to all that would enslave the dour
recollection of our rapport,
but we persist as sun and moon and nebulas
still being born in the galaxies
beyond our making. I give you no cure,
only the long aeons of your
life without me, the sure cold of Munch’s Frieze.
Destitute
In another hour my love wanders the streets,
I hear her singing her sad songs
in the summer rain, dreaming of dying.
She is not afraid of death.
I name her whispered sighs
as if they had reached me from another world,
a world beyond knowing
where trees might speak, and the child
within each of us is never wholly lost.
My love is alone, she wanders into a soup kitchen,
a white rose in her hand
for her far away child.
She is more beautiful than any words can tell
despite her wasted limbs,
but the hours rob me of her innocence
which would voice her arrival in my dreams.
My love endures the ruination
of our century singing in empty doorways.
She came into my life singing her rhapsody in blue,
and fades away in a fog of lamentation.
The Galway Review 