Mark A. Murphy

Innocent Blood

Whose innocent blood is this?

Where did you see the innocent blood?

Was it the innocent blood of a child, a son or daughter?

Was it the innocent blood of a mother or father?

Who found the innocent blood?

Was the innocent blood spilled in al-Byada,

in Gaza, in Bengasi, in Odessa?

Was the innocent blood spilled in your land?

Was the innocent blood spilled in the morning or the evening?

Did you declare the innocent blood innocent?

Was the spilling of innocent blood a massacre, a holocaust?

Who is guilty of innocent blood shedding?

Why was the innocent blood shed under heaven's gaze?

What is to be done with the innocent blood?

Did you mop the innocent blood?

Did you cross your self and pray at the sight of the innocent blood?

Did you leave the innocent blood abandoned in the street?

Did you bury the innocent blood?

Whose innocent blood is this?

Poor Poets Sing

We shall not sing of 'defence of the realm'

or 'nation',

nor of Harlan Ullman,

(whose name shall ever evince annihilation)

nor Prime Ministers and Presidents, system-makers,

gangsters, bloodsuckers,

the henchmen of pound and dollar.

We poor poets would rather tear out our hearts

than give song

to the extraordinary lives of the rich.

We sing not of the dreams forgotten

in a century of wars,

but of the hard fought freedoms of our forebears.

For all those who have toiled, we shall fight,

and we shall learn to sing the truth.

Seven Day Eternity

Always, there is some inexpressible grief unfolding

in the world that our bodies

cannot wholly escape,

beyond the apple orchard down the lane

where a boy falls and breaks his arm stealing apples

from the orchard's greedy owner,

beyond the 'grand final' live

and the greedy advertising on billboards,

beyond the latest headlines and the 'war on terror',

there is a list of dead insurgents,

a list of dead GI's,

and always, somewhere, there are those that will cry out:

'God, save us.' And then, 'God, revenge us.'

Mark A. Murphy is the editor of the online journal, POETiCA REViEW. His poetry collections include Tin Cat Alley (Spout Publications, 1996), Our Little Bit of Immortality (Erbacce Press, 2011), Night-watch Man & Muse (Salmon Poetry, 2013) and his next full length collection, Night Wanderer’s Plea is pending from Waterloo Press in the UK. He is currently looking for a publisher for his collection of epigrams, Little Known Aphorisms and he is now also working on a full length collection of Ekphrastic poems, Word Painting. His poems have been published in 18 countries in over 200 journals in print and online.