Friday, February 20, 2015

Poem for the Weekend: Peter E. Murphy



Peter E. Murphy was born in Wales and grew up in New York City. A former high school teacher of English and creative writing, he is the founder of Murphy Writing of Stockton College, which organizes retreats and programs for poets, writers and teachers, in the U.S. and abroad. You can read more here.

At the New Age Hotel
by Peter E. Murphy

Below my balcony, bright November
warms the participants
from the Inner Work Symposium
who stretch for chi to infuse their well-fed lives.

Swaying to the rhythmic music
of traffic, they inhale New Jersey
where the euphonious Passaic
flows into the Yang Tze.

Light breaks out of their tail bones,
rises through a forest of spines
into their brains as fifty bodies raise their arms
and rock their torsos to solve the calculus

of consciousness, the problem of gravity.
Then back, back into the ballroom
where macrobiotic chefs prepare a banquet
out of nothingness.

The devout are ravenous to eat
what they have become and hope
it will nourish them when they sag
back into their Blazers and drive home.

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"As soon as we express something, we devalue it strangely. We believe ourselves to have dived down into the depths of the abyss, and when we once again reach the surface, the drops of water on our pale fingertips no longer resemble the ocean from which they came...Nevertheless, the treasure shimmers in the darkness unchanged." ---Franz Kafka