For many years, Bryan Murphy used his ability to teach English as a means of seeing the world. He has now settled as a translator in Turin, Italy. In 2000, his poetry appeared in Switched-on Gutenburg, Moveo Angelus, Mudlark, CleanSheets, the Intercultural Platform, Poetic Voices, Poetrynow, MillenniumShift and Snakeskin.
Peace Dividend
Fingers charred, I launch
Operation Forget Jeannette
gingerly
enlist your help,
frighten you too
with easy access
to your control panel,
call up a capacity
in you for abandon,
free your gentleness.
You bloom,
carry on your skin
a sheen of potential
fated to be fulfilled
too fast. You balk, find
my brainwashed opposition
to the killing of Kosovo
motive to cleanse me
from your sheets,
staunch my lips.
Two weeks of shocked denial
Cancel from my memory
the impetus to forget Jeannette.
Freed from the hope you inspired,
my pride pruned to malleability,
I seek anew the flame of her gaze
in which I am scathed but unhated.
There is contact.
Climbing in Guizhou
The last in your class
to vaunt the blue Mao jacket,
squinting through spectacles
bound with dull tape.
Rarely a word
volunteered to a teacher,
a grin of embarrassment,
but no words, to a girl.
Less than a smidgen
of elegance, grace,
no light of intelligence
shines from your face.
The first in your family
to rise this "high",
no provincial inertia
dams your determination.
While classmates rejoice
in how little they know,
your peasant's shoulders push back
broad boundaries of ignorance.
Astigmatism does not
make you short-sighted.
Hunger fails to quench
your thirst for knowledge.
Poverty cannot bankrupt
your shy enthusiasm.
We watch, spellbound,
as slowly, surely,
the tree of knowledge
yields you its finer fruits.
Hate Object
I'll tell you what I so despise:
his body language, use of eyes;
ponderous posturing, a leer that sneers;
that reluctant lift of his rugged dome
before he swivels his stalks
from the leeree to the sneeree,
imparts the sneer, then re-focuses
on the object of his leer.
In terms of nastiness, that's hardly enough! I could
knock that out of him with a left-handed cuff.
I'll ignore those pretensions, unimagine those snubs,
take the bastard out drinking, visiting clubs.
A friend of my cronies can't be so sickening:
I can live better without bile a-thickening.
I'll give him some face, buy a few beers.
With luck the bugger'll choke saying "Cheers".
Half Century
Sod the Millennium, this lad's turning fifty!
Mid-life crisis, like the Middle Ages,
well past, if not yet fully overcome;
second adolescence rapidly coalescing,
like our tele-guided culture,
into another stab at childhood.
Freer than I ever could have hoped,
more alone than I ever could have imagined.
Shipwrecked by a masochistic streak?
Addiction to "those first times"?
Irresistibly attracted to a challenge too strong?
Social intelligence of minus one?
Yet fearless of the future:
twice retired, now set fair to work,
overpaid, for a brittle pension.
Money, some friends, recognition, health -
ready to go at a moment's notice.