Richard Thomas Murray

Selected Poems

Family Tree

The dogwood outside our kitchen window
waves at me in the wind
like a giant hand
reaching out of the ground
to grab my attention,
not to signal goodbye
because it doesn’t want to be
left behind when we uproot ourselves
from our home of ten years.
We can’t take it
with us in a literal sense,
but it breaks through
the invisible barrier of the window
as the sun projects
its shadow like veins
onto my skin to show me
it’s in my blood.

By Richard Thomas Murray
The Seventh Quarry
Winter/Spring 2026

Ancient History

Seventeenth-century artifacts discovered
intact beneath Harvard Yard,
not crushed under the weight
of all that learning;
the house of pirate Captain Kidd
excavations near Wall Street
blew the cover off;
a lost DaVinci mural,
The Battle of Anghiari,
uncovered beneath a Vasari fresco
in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio;
and Lenape arrowheads scratching
the surface and piercing
our feet at Morgan’s Beach,
the past making itself felt
through the sands of time
and bleeding into the future.
All this comes up
as I dust off this poem
after too many years
and dig through its broken English
to put you back
together and make sense
of who you were.

By Richard Thomas Murray
The Seventh Quarry
Winter/Spring 2026

Shapeshifters

He’d spotted the first
of his five-year-old life
outside my kitchen window that morning.
He was seeing red
of a different kind
after we hadn’t sighted
another cardinal all day
because he’d be leaving
in twelve hours for a country
where they don’t fly.
There was no magic
in the air anymore
and not much light
when we walked out
of the woods behind my house.
We lowered our sights
to the black hole
a pond made in the earth
when suddenly his arm
jerked downward like a divining rod
at two red carp
gliding up to us
on fins like wings
and rearranging our faces.

By Richard Thomas Murray
The Main Street Rag
Winter 2025

Phoenix

For Mick Fedullo, 1949-2017
Author of Light of the Feather: A Teacher’s Journey
Into Native American Classrooms and Culture

We carried what remained
after cancer burned through his organs
and the firewood of his bones
and his bank account
as high into the Pryor Mountains
as we could hike in October,
guided by Apsaalooke friends
to a cliff where his ashes
rose in the wind
like little feathers fanning the sun.

By Richard Thomas Murray
The Main Street Rag
Fall 2023

The Tree of Light

Reading between the lines
of an illuminated manuscript
projected onto the wall
through the open blinds
of an unlit room
reveals the flowering dogwood
wired to the ground
outside the glittering window
its white bulbs electrified
moonlight turning them up
to a higher power.

By Richard Thomas Murray
The Bitter Oleander
Spring 2020

Protective Measures

You feel it catch
in the skeletal net.
Muscles get a grip.
Veins tie it down.
Skin holds it in.

It opens your eyes
to the tangled message
hazel branches inscribe
across the peeled face
of the apple moon
papering the horizon.

White birch filaments
illuminate the invisible.
Stakes made of ash
raise your solid house
above drowning in it.
A willow moat
guards against fire.

By Richard Thomas Murray
The Bitter Oleander
Spring 2020

Theory of Evolution

It’s at my fingertips,
where dry skin’s splitting
from something bigger than I am
trying to reach beyond
me into the world
of flesh it wants to touch.
It will work its way out
of my ripped body
like an explorer who has crossed
the two-thirds of me that’s water
to kneel and kiss
the solid ground it walks on.

By Richard Thomas Murray
Slipstream #38
2018

Life Size

Body chemistry couldn’t alchemize
age-old, basic truth,
and make golden years
out of the transformation
of a man not in his element.
His violin in his stiffening hands
felt like dead wood
than rang hollow and echoed troubles
not music to his tin ears.
Iron-poor blood and metal fatigue
of steel nerves had him leaning
toward a complete collapse,
yet he seemed more inclined
to not cave in
the last time I saw him standing.
His overly firm handshake
gave the impression of someone trying
too hard to hold on,
and revealed a statue
he was turning into
from the inside out,
starting with the hardening of his arteries.

By Richard Thomas Murray
Slipstream #35
2015

Immortality

The patio furniture I left outside
this summer
is buried now in a grave
of snow level with the desk
from which I rise.

By Richard Thomas Murray
The Moth – Issue #20
Spring 2015

After an Argument

Darkness weighs on me
like a giant period,
yet I can’t get any deeper
than lying still,
a flat-out imitation
of the sleep I’m so conscious of
being unable to realize.
The whites of my eyes like moons
are my worst enemies,
but I could also mention
an invisible foe:
blasts of heat
venting right in my face,
from the fired-up furnace
that’s been making noise all night.
My pillow also doesn’t muffle
the yelling I can’t get
out of my head,
nor does it soften my anger
toward the person sleeping beside me,
who irritates me so well
she can do it
even with her eyes closed.

By Richard Thomas Murray
Rattle - #16
Winter 2001