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Mark Murphy

 

 

 

 

Pensées

 

I hold your absence in my palm like pathos

or a wager chasing shadows,

pursuing God in an ontological coin toss.

 

“God is, or he is not.” Unconscionable to bet

against eternal life for the opposite

possibility of gaining nothing.

 

I wonder if God will honor the bet?

Is he not the God of love, all benevolent?

We could die chasing after these thoughts.

 

I hold your absence in my palm like bathos

or an echo at the end of time,

pursuing God in an ontological coin toss.

 

Fernweh

 

i

 

I hear your song at the end of the world,

the edge of all things

 

like a murmur in an abyss

with no echo.

 

And I'm descending inside myself

shoring these ruined

 

cravings, cities and landscapes

as though they were part of a lost dream.

 

ii

 

If God had eyes to see

and hands to sculpt these sempiternal ruins

 

would he not seat man and wife

conjointly

 

at the throne

of the victorious chorus (?)

 

where no manly distance

could forbid the ache of love's desires.

 

 

 

Mark A. Murphy’s first full length collection, Night-watch Man & Muse was published in November 2013 from Salmon Poetry (Eire). http://www.salmonpoetry.com/details.php?ID=315&a=250

 

Murphy’s poems have been published in over 100 magazines and ezines in 17 different countries world wide. He is currently working on a new play, Lenny's Wake for which he is looking for a publisher and a stage production.

Pluviophile

 

It's raining in the almost forgotten doomsday village,

beating down on St Mary's tower,

filling the gutterings which overflow with joy

whilst a local man tears open his shirt

 

and dances on the dry earth, soon to be quenched

by the summer storm. He remembers

stories of old monsoons and imagines living

in a rain forest where he might hide

 

from his peers and swim in black water rivers

where the daily downpours would renew

and awaken in him a lost innocence,

that he might smell the ground and trees once more

 

and cry out to the gods: this is the day I've dreamed

all my life, this be the day it rained forever!

 

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