These poems are drawn from a sequence entitled “Ancient Whispers” that utilize themes from classical or Slavic myth. Each poem deals with the irony and vicissitudes of human experience, the terrible price Ganymede's father pays for the God's gift of horses, Igor Stravinsky’s exile accompanied by the very spoon with which he was fed as a child, and Persephone’s return from the Underworld as a metaphor for the delivery of a stillbirth. — F Kevin Murphy

Ancient Whispers

A Mythic Poem Sequence

Persephone

That secret plumpness we shared
Beneath your belt
Is gone now,
With the color in your cheeks.

Your eyes gone
a little gray
like January mornings,
you are Persephone
returned
with no gifts from
beneath the earth,
saying prayers
the color of bleeding
and long as sighs.

Your prayers gone
a little gray
like January snow,
you are Persephone
returned with no crocuses from
beneath the mountain of love,
singing laments
the texture of cottonwood ashes
and the size of mayfly tears.

Your songs gone
like small uprooted flowers,
you are Persephone returned
quite unexpected
from caves where crickets,
bleeding as they sing,
feel for tiny prayers
along the damp walls and nine circles
of your belly.

It is not the last time
you will bleed for your children
or say the mass
like dead poplars in winter.

On Ganymede

How so comely was my Ganymede,
Borne to Olympus beyond such pain
To gain immortality as cupbearer to the gods,
Lost to a loving father,
And now the only man among the moons of Jupiter,
The only male lover of Zeus,
Consort of eagles, in rising glissades,
Through the slow dripping rain,
Bearer of mead-bright sweet forgetfulness?

Is the honor of it,
Is the gift of God’s horses enough
That a grieving father’s heart might swell with pride?
Bury your Trojan face in the wet wondrous mane
And try to forget your beautiful son before you ride.

Stravinsky’s spoon

“They change their sky but not their souls
who cross the ocean.”
Horace, Odes

“The years are cracked
and swollen with feeling.”
Shaun Griffin, Snowmelt

The very same silver spoon
With which his serf and nanny fed him,
The little boy his breakfast,
Escaped with him tucked behind a pocket square,
His freedom, justice and compassion in another pocket,
A flight into music of another race,
Memories of syrnikis and syrup in another…
Ponchiki and porridge,
The fragrance of larch and spruce and aspen
Through the open window of a boyhood kitchen.

Leave behind the Scythian soil and soul and substance,
Scythians who ate with dagger and sword,
Who had no use for spoons or pentatonic forks
And danced a dance of death.
No Spring could change the song
That chosen exile is still an exile.
The golden garden of the firebird simmered in his brain.
The violent Scythian rites in Spring,
Scythian circles of Spring,
Dance for the Earth, our Lady of Courage,
The virgin dancing into heaven
That the Earth may leaf and flower.
Here the dead no longer speak
But still they listen.

Like beads of truth dripping from memory,
Like raspberry jam on draniki,
The glowing dying firebird’s last golden feather drops
In that impenetrable garden.
With ostentati of freedom and genius,
He flew from Russia and the ashes of the firebird
On the wings of Pulcinella
And layers of asymmetric rhythms.
Spoon into my murmuring mouth the last bowl of borscht,
When on the final day
The spoon of sorrows clatters in the last empty bowl.

Dr. Murphy received his BA and MA in Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, where he was poetry editor of the Charles Street Review, and his MD at UCLA, where he was editor of Plexus. He subsequently trained in medicine and infectious diseases at the University of Wisconsin, CDC, and University of Texas Southwestern Medical School.

Late in life, he has returned to writing poetry after a career in academic and clinical medicine. He remains clinical professor of medicine at University of Nevada, Reno, School of Medicine. His poetry has appeared in Visions International and Gemini Magazine or is forthcoming in the Pennsylvania Literary Journal and his fiction in The Brussels Review.

He lives in the rain-shadow of the Sierras, with his wife Rachael, surrounded by spruce, aspens, pines, quail & jays, bobcats, foxes and bears. During Advent, a bear limped across the patio, consuming strawberries left for rabbits, reminiscent of the bear and strawberry tree in Madrid’s Puerto del Sol. This one would only find a strawberry tree on the other side of the mountain.