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Joseph Murphy Oct 2018
Great author to check out: Sometime ago I came across the poetry of August Kleinzahler. A selection of his poetry appeared in 2017: Before Dawn on Bluff Road/Hollyhocks in the Fog: Selected New Jersey Poems/Selected San Francisco Poems.  For more info: via my blog: https://www.josephmurphypoet.com/blog/
Joseph Murphy Oct 2018
The world is full of poetry. The air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies, and sparkle in its brightness. —James Gates Percival
Joseph Murphy Oct 2018
I paced the flying bridge.

Dawn: only my watch awake;
clear, breezy.
heat still bearable.

No scent or sight of land; no other vessel.

Our bow cadent: lifting, lowering;
cutting ahead.

Easy to imagine
none had set that course;
come that far.

© Joseph Murphy 2018
From Having Lived (Kelsay Books, 2018)
Joseph Murphy Oct 2018
A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. —Robert Frost
Joseph Murphy Oct 2018
In that spring’s first true gleam,
Lightening creased the walls
And thunder gathered the rarest of fragrances
Into its mouth.

The water from my tipped bowl
Spilled down a mountain the height of a ****; the breeze
Read aloud evening’s first page.

It was then that rain rose from the soil
And a star descended
Through the roots of these words.

The evening became brighter, quieter:
No minute hand’s clatter broke through;
No wheel skidded past.

Time became nothing more or less than time.

I cast my lines ashore: sang as prow and sail burned,
Knowing my wounds would heal.

Thoughts that had been tightly woven spun loose.
That evening’s warmth lingered on my bare shoulders;

The scent of damp loam sweetened the air.
In that enormous space,

Our past seemed no more than a whisper
Sensed at the edge of sleep.

© Joseph Murphy 2017
Joseph Murphy Sep 2018
Newly plowed fields leant me their brilliance.

The breeze hailed furrows in my wake; churned
through flower-haze
and noon’s heady brine.

But a robin dove
to bumper height; struck; cart-wheeled
into the brush,
emptying my hands.

©Joseph Murphy 2018

— The End —