Field Goals
Each generation resurrects
“kicking down” from Hierarchy Heights.
The brainstem budges the boulder
from the cave mouth: “Says Me.”
Out the windows kindness
heads for the valleys at each birth.
Punching up lacks in distinction
and swings at boots without knuckles
blackening an eye, bloodying a nose.
Evolution, the great master teacher,
gets into the egg and sperm classroom first.
Lifetime courage courses require
that no self show up for short bursts,
live-round, experience training.
Only charity and cowards give up a hoot.
Citizens measure against debt,
bank accounts, and stock portfolios
to decide whether to can-can
or goose step to the market.
White Washers
White washers scrub at history
books until “Indians” and slaves
vanish with erasers that bristle.
The back hairs on any reader
without memory don’t stand on end.
Tainting paint with Klan hands,
eyedroppers dispense from schools
the color knowledge needed
for blindness in day-to-day life.
Palettes dilute into dumb palates.
Masked street sweepers dust up
into unmarked cars and warehouse
immigrants until jets return, while
forklifting denial into news outlets
contradicting pedestrian cameras.
At the liberty library for the right
descendants, the empty reading
room speaks without a murmur:
Vacant, any volume doesn’t mutter,
doesn’t echo, doesn’t matter.
Handkerchief Waves
What remains in the international
intelligence pool that tooled a nation
and world drains through a sieve
to home countries sweeping
hometown brain trusts elsewhere also.
Bye-bye free thought exceptionalism.
The seepage around universities
muddies so that second and third
class studies pass for good reasoning
while wearing out erasers and patching
over with makeshift information.
A first generation suffers from a setback
in understanding other peoples
while losing footholds in knowing
a planet and the atmosphere.
Each culture returns to a scapegoat
including at the meeting place
where local boredom whets tongues
prepping for action from the herd.
After the global sharing strategy
for living in one solar system
what remains calculates poorly
as though thrashing in a maelstrom.
Rich Murphy’s latest collections, Elephant by Bass Clef Books, Storage Shed and Inside Stories by Resource Publications and Mind of Europe: A Genealogy to The Fat Man and Susan Constant by Cyberwit were published 2024-2025, following First Aid and Footholds (2023). Asylum Seeker (2018) was published by Press Americana. His poetry won The Poetry Prize at Press Americana twice for Americana (2013), The Left Behind (2021), and Gival Press Poetry Prize for Voyeur (2008). His first book was The Apple in the Monkey Tree by Codhill Press (2007).