Tuesday, August 20, 2013

A Poem by Christina Murphy


Dappled Stars
 
We are searching for wildflowers on a misty day.
 
We are walking, and I am wishing you would tell me
something you want me to hear, but I have made my peace
with our silences. Our lives have become coextensive orbits,
visible, but not in range in any meaningful way
beyond our mundane daily rhythms.    
The trail is streaked with wildflowers captured by the wind. 
I would like the wildflowers to be like gems—stationary
against all the changes of times and seasons that will come
to claim them as fragile beings. And I would like my heart
to be motionless on this spring day in which the weight
of the mountains against the horizon is almost unbearable.   
 
Soon you have found the wildflower you love most
for its gentle blue color that makes it look as if
the sky bent down for a moment and lost itself in mystery.
 
The blue wildflower and the blue sky that we are tempted
to think of as one even though the blues do not touch,
and the blue sky seems another illusory world away
filled with dappled stars and incandescent meanings.
 
The mist is now rain, steady with a soft
drumbeat of insistence. You draw your jacket
tight and brace yourself against the wet winds
as I watch the wildflowers get beaten down, as if
their colors were tears draining off into the land.
 
I reach for your hand and hold it, feeling the coldness
the wind and rain have instilled. For a moment, my sight
is blurred by rain or perhaps by tears, but everything
is silent, and I would like to believe that we can escape
our sad hollowness of spirit.
 
I am hoping for this as I listen to my heartbeat,
my own pulse, and wish that the
chill of icy rain could comfort me and pass for feeling.
 
 
 
Christina Murphy’s poems have appeared in a range of journals and anthologies, including, most recently, Cease, Cows, Chicago Literati, and Dr. Hurley's Snake-Oil Cure.
 

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