Rats At Sea

TO A DESCENDANT READING MY POEMS

Looking for me?

I posed for posterity.

I used words to cover my tracks.

Did my sincerity

sufficiently conceal my truth?

Can you deduce what I was then

from idiosyncratic verses

and a few ambiguous titles?

Can you deduce what I am now

from what you have deduced from then?

Is that too much like sifting ancient light

to find a long-gone distant star?

Then, I was X (I marked my spot)

modified by youth and age and vanity

and love and suffering and indifference.

Now, I am X modified by my purposes,

as you are Y trapped in your own contexts.

Where X equals Pure Me,

and Y equals Pure You,

there is nothing stands between us,

only time.

Finding The Join

If
You can't,
You won't.

But if
you are curious
about what happens
between
twenty-three-sixty
and
treble-oh-oh,

or
what goes into
the crack separating
the last of May
from
the first of June,

then
you are in for
a lifetime of
sideroads and
alleyways
and strange people
and stranger
experiences and

finally,
perhaps after you die,
it will all
become clear and

you
will
understand.

Valentine

Meditation

Autumn Tree- Mull
© Judith Murray

I sat
And sought
The tree-ness
Of the tree
And found the tree's
Own search to be
The me-ness
Of the me.

Birthday Tree

Happy Birthday Granny! 

Anniversary

The Poem

From the writer's own typed collection

How About A Poem

Something of beauty
in its sounds,
in its images.

Profound
in its meanings,
in its insights.

Evocative
of deep feeling,
of soul-searching.

A touch of melancholy
for the melancholy man.

Earnest,
concerned,

AND FATALLY FLAWED.

Intent on telling the tales
of the saint who grassed
to the secret police
on his father's politics,

and the angel
in the bar of Heaven,
masturbating.

Forward

The poet's own introduction to a volume he titled "Poet In A Hurry" - a chronological collection of his poems.

Just As

Just as the lover finds, who only
loves if loved, the truth of love
is unconditional.

Just as the sculptor, who can dream
the form inside the marble block,
will come to know the chiselled space
within the form.

Just as the painter, who has used the life
to copy life, will ultimately live
in pure white canvasses.

So will the poet learn to sing
his songs in silence,
ceasing to insert his words
between desired and known.

Poet in a Hurry

I am a poet in a hurry,
impatient to disgorge
my torrents
before they shall be damned
by the stilting
of the brain's dead cells;

furiously engaged
lest insiduous senility
shall staunch my streams;
enraged
by atrophy's encroach
upon the channel's purity.

Verse is my emetic,
the enema prescribed
to precede parturition,
and, in defiance of
the last prostatic twitch,
my aphrodisiac.