CHRISTINA MURPHY

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.

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                    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