Art Murphy

STARFISH

First of all a radius, traced by legs
as subtle as a bird’s wing bone
from centre to your ending –
you are both star and fish,

five spokes of yourself,
in flattened brick-red symmetry
how so supple, how so tough –
your appetite voracious,

you will swallow anything whole,
your calcareous skeleton
hydraulically moved by tube-feet
that pull bivalves apart for your pharynx

to suck the soft body out.
You have gone about your business
as men have in the measure of their pleasure
to the circumference of their core.

O little starfish, is there a Blake
to appraise your blood-red factory
in the rising level of warming seas,
our centuries’ fearful symmetry –

a Book of John to put you right
if you should feel you were wrong –
another Prometheus you to enflame
and trick the mighty Zeus again?

Can you be calculated, not only in inches,
but by any other measure
and this before the serpent tempted Adam
to bite an apple and expose his nuclear heart?

Art Murphy had the privilege of attending Seamus Heaney’s literature class at Queen’s, Belfast and receiving his insights on Yeats, Eliot, Frost, Bishop, Larkin. And of course, the poet’s live and intense relationship with home, landscape and the human touch with both. At present he is exploring the valley he lives in, from mountain to sea in a sequence of lyrics, that range from romantic to apocalyptic.

Art said this about his poem:

All creatures share the same energy – in their urge to live. I suppose poetry tries to find symbols for “consciousness” of that.