Christina Murphy’s poetry is an exploration of consciousness as subjective experience, and her poems appear in numerous journals and anthologies, including, PANK, Dali’s Lovechild, and Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, and the anthologies From the Roaring Deep: A Devotional in Honor of Poseidon and the Spirits of the Sea, The Great Gatsby Anthology, Let the Sea Find Its Edges, and Remaking Moby-Dick. Her work has been nominated multiples times for the Pushcart Prize and for the Best of the Net anthology.

                    Before There Were Rebels



Before there were rebels, there were prodigals;
before there were prodigals, there were fathers;
before there were fathers, there was God.

Perhaps. Or maybe God was a conventionalist,
not a prodigal, or a rebel, and only peripherally a father.
Deciphering is the key because there is no way to know.

So the mind plays with logic and the heart plays with need,
and any of the three will work depending upon how it is
one needs to see or understand stability or chaos.

God the conventionalist would have created out of duty
God the rebel would have created out of spite
God the prodigal would have created to re-create a lost unity

Seeing God as the conventionalist, it is easy to praise 
God’s work ethic. A lot was accomplished—beyond
perhaps even God’s expectations

Seeing God as the rebel gives one sympathy for those
who feel angry at being in someone else’s world
on someone else’s terms

Seeing God as the prodigal makes one aware of
transgressions and the desire to make amends by
replacing a broken trust with a new world of second chances

Seeing God as God lacks the human touch, which might
be fine with God, but is too limiting for humans,
who might wish to think of God as one of their own

So perhaps God was none of these but just a child
seeking to play in a world of no playmates,
in a vast darkness before the Let there be light

And God the child was a visionary, and the ideas became
visions, which became the three-dimensional forms 
that humans came to know as reality

Ah, the prodigal plays, the rebel fantasizes, 
and God the child mourns for companionship
equal to God the child’s abilities and interests 

And everywhere, the Universe mourns for lack 
a North-Star God who is centered within
the darkness and defined by light

The world is a dream of perfection that falls
from grace in every pensive moment
of a human or God-like heart

Rebel on, oh God, while prodigals you have created
look for the way home in the bittersweet melancholy
of stepping stones into stillness

Christina Murphy’s poetry is an exploration of consciousness as subjective experience, and her poems appear in numerous journals and anthologies, including, PANK, Dali’s Lovechild, and Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, and the anthologies From the Roaring Deep: A Devotional in Honor of Poseidon and the Spirits of the Sea, The Great Gatsby Anthology, Let the Sea Find Its Edges, and Remaking Moby-Dick. Her work has been nominated multiples times for the Pushcart Prize and for the Best of the Net anthology.

A TOWN WHERE THE MERMAID by Christina Murphy
​
a town where the mermaid
is a run-down bar and fishing nets hang 
on wooden walls,

the sea nearby rocks
in fragmented lights;

the waves are reminders
of change and temporality— 
nothing lasts beyond small motions

not hearts or grains of sand, not even
stars someday when infinity is exhausted
and nothing remains to understand the silence

INTERSECTIONS by Christina Murphy

The order of things is the outer shell
of stems & roots, waterfalls & bedrock
opening into the softest sighs of patterns
shaped by the intersections of evening light 

The grains of ocean sand
are blossoming stairways,
narrowly extending into a way of being,
silently beautiful in all forms of light

Concealed in clouds are the tears of the lost,
the wrong turns, the sad choices—all hidden
within the white shadows floating, like delicate smoke,
across a deeply blue & motionless sky

ALL THINGS CONTAINED BY ZERO by Christina Murphy
​
1.
Hillsides in the blue haze of evening
where intricate honeysuckle vines frame
the melancholy of the sun’s diminishing heat

Rippled water shines in silken layers,
and all the world’s failings are revealed 
by the loneliness of each mooring of dreams in an endless sea

All things contained by zero will be reshaped  
by the meanings held in one fragile moment--
night’s darkness approaching like the shadows

Of moonlight on ancient waters, restless with currents
as the graceful arc of gravity connects land and sky
through a latticework of clouds and waves stirring

2.
In light, in darkness, the world does not seem a globe 
but a surface layered with growth and diminishment
and a circumference that defines what might have been

Like the stones on eroded shores that, in twilight,
look like angels seeking a way to speak to the heavens,
the indifference is cold and deep, more silent than foreboding

And only the tides—like blood—move through channels
and bow down to the fate that holds infinity in its scope
and reshapes the absence entwined within every moment