2025 | Terrapin Books

You Too Were Once on Fire

“Grief and relief / rhyme,” says a poem, and if there’s grief aplenty here, there’s a hundred times as much grace, as much elegance, as much unflagging splendor.” ~David Kirby, The Winter Dance Party: Poems, 1983–2023

“Murphy is clearly still immersed in flames and invites us to share in the warmth, and the burn.” ~Grisel Y. Acosta, Wild

“These poems made me feel blessed to have read them and have a very real chance of being passed down from generation to generation.” ~Joel Dias-Porter, Ideas of Improvisation

Coming Soon

Excerpt

The Diaspora of Light

When he saw it shooting from the eyes
of his students, Plato realized that, like imagination,
light must be restrained. So he tried to chain
it in a cave like the wild thing it is
and invented stories to explain the folly
of perception. This light has traveled far
to ignite us. And because it is always moving,
it cannot be held…or saved.
You might say its greatest strength
is that it knows it is dying. And when it does,
it breaks into a million colors.
Does it sadden you to learn that goldfish
see more of these colors than you do? Bees,
birds, lizards…they too see what you cannot see.

When we were one-celled and luminescent
in the pond that spawned us, there was no space
in our peculiar jelly for doubt to metastasize.
Why then, knowing our brilliance would fade,
did we abandon that world to walk upright?
Our folly is that we believed we would be happy
in exile, far from a homeland
to which we will never return.
Is it a strength for you? Or a weakness,
knowing that you will die? Is this why,
when light ebbs during the cooler months,
you find it difficult to lift your body
from your bed, and you cannot stem the tide
of water leaking from your eyes?

Enjoy this amazing video created by Michael DiGiorgio of RedJacketFilms.