Five poems by Mark Murphy

A Winter’s Day

She doesn’t sing the song of her own life,

of deep, dark December

from the arboretum window,

but she foretells the snow and separation of lovers

as if finding everything and nothing within–

she drops death’s disguise,

the rut of self and talking backwards to sing

the songs of her own people.

Now her limbs tremble as she climbs high above

the tallest palms, magnolia

and mountain ash, higher still, than elm and yew

to act as witness for the child of freedom.

Giving all she owns of herself. Eyes alive, mind high,

breaking all the rules– she touches

everyone and everyone touches her.

Missive for Our Time

Things are never what they seem

and what’s worth telling

must be written in as few words as possible.

Like proof of a god, who is in everything

but religion and church.

And though we’re all strangers

in this world, mother and son still hope

for father’s love. If we’re to reconcile ourselves

to our existence here, we must accept

our world isn’t the best of all possible worlds.

We’re all brethren here, Freddie.

You are living proof that sincerity is no illusion.

And this is our sincere reality.

Angelus Novus

Art does not reproduce what we see, rather, it makes us see.

Paul Klee

All art is metaphor. Even when it evokes theunion

between progress and catastrophe,

time in need of salvation, an ancestor

in need of awakening, or an angel thwarted

by war and civil war. A storm cloud

blown in from paradise –

trapped between future past and future present.

Suspended in the struggle for empty-time.

Staring towards the horizon, saying something

profound. Awaiting an answer, beyond

the artifice of perception, as she turns her thoughts

away from internal flight.

The West is the best. The West is the best.

Here! Here! Let’s hear the rest! Light at the end

of the tunnel –the only extraction now

from time in a cage.

Qualitative Conspiracy

If all things share interdependence

with their opposite number–

what of the annihilation of opposites

by way of negation.

When Frau Demuth, declares, ‘I am lying,’

(if she is indeed lying)

then she must be telling the truth

which means she just lied. The antimony

of the liar–can only be negated,

since lying and truth-telling

share the same episteme.

Placing any claim to truth or untruth

(or A = not A) in a strait-jacket

of total contradiction.

Leaving the good housekeeper

to wonder at the real men of action–

secluded in Ivory Towers.

Civilising thought. Quantifying reality.

One variable at a time.

Subverting Shadows

i

Every age fosters great expectations in its men of ideas

but what is the cost of ‘greatness’

in personal sacrifice for a woman living

in the shadows of genius,

defying patriarchy and parochialism

to challenge Victorian notions of ‘womanhood,’

defying all our expectations

of a woman’s ‘proper place,’ to venture

ideals –living by her own ideas.

A woman who would work for nothing but love

in an age where housework

was hardly accepted as ‘genuine’ work,

let alone ‘integral’ to the development of those ideas.

ii

Is it too much for us to learn from the example

of a woman who spoke

for the Commune, not by theorizing

at the expense of linking arms. Not by proclaiming

the arrival of the proletariat

on the world’s stage. Not by conjecture

and refutation of formal logic.

Not by dialectics on the page, but substantiating

the logic of unifying genders in a war

against division and degradation. Taking to the shadows

in a systematic subversion of her own relations.

Not to absolve responsibility

but to fully embrace the orbit of her obligations.

Taking care of business

so as to make life more bearable

for the men who would challenge the ‘authority’

of reality itself.