David MurphyChurch Bell
The air’s dead in the cemetery.
Unmoving, the Spanish moss drapes
like monks’ robes in a monastery
in that gliding Reaper’s shape.
Live oaks stand as still as lead.
A sound. Through glossed air comes a knell:
sliding like glaze, sticking like dread,
conducting a new soul to its stone cell.
Death in Autumn by a Waterfall
In autumn’s gold-larched, cold Cascades
a river runs down a mountain—
whose slopes are hued in honeyed shades,
glazed in spray as from a fountain—
to kiss the stone of an abyss.
From water dashed against granite
a roar rises like plains thunder,
while the bay, from trees that dam it,
smells of moist earth from dense vapor,
and mist bedews sheer cliffs of shist.
And there in brumey, drizzly clag
waits the gloomy, black-robed reaper,
calm ’neath a cantilevered crag,
to bear an old careworn sleeper,
with soothing hiss, to the last bliss.
This poem is written for those shy people who have a great deal of thought and a great deal of talent and imagination, but who do not express what is beautiful that is inside them.
I see this man he’s made of stone
His mind’s a steel trap, his heart’s of bone,
His eyes are granite, grey and deep,
He works without end, he does not sleep.
I’ve seen this woman, she’s made of fire,
With a mind as brilliant as a pyre,
Her memory is perfect, like licking flames,
She forgets nothing, no one’s names.
I’ve seen them both: the stone, the blaze;
They both impress me, they both amaze.
We celebrate them and set them high
On plinths to be watched by every eye.
I see this man he’s all alone
His heart’s of flowers, his mind’s of brome,
His eyes are blue, his hands are weak,
There’s a voice in his heart that cannot speak.
I see this woman, she’s huddled there,
Her clothes are tatters, her feet are bare
In her heart are larks that sing
While outside her is a cold that stings.
I’ve seen them both: the bloom, the bird;
They hide their minds, conceal the word,
Their eyes they seem to have lost their gleam,
But in their hearts beats the human dream.
The Man Made of Fruits
There once was a man made of fruits
And his feet were bananas in boots
He had a raspberry nose
And blackberry toes
And his hair was an apple tree’s roots!
The Blinking Boulder
There once was a stone that could blink
It was a boulder that was as sable as ink
It had a white eye
As white as the clouds in the sky
And if you watched it closely it’d wink.
The Walking Dune
There once was a desert dune
That was shaped by the searing simoom
It took on the shape of a Sphinx
When by day it lay like a lynx
Then by night it walked by the light of the moon.
