The Dragon In The Morning

Diamond-shaped sunlight
splits the horizon into plumes
of white birds ascending

Stone arrows echo in the mountains
as cold winds bring the prophet 
into the garden to speak of 

Singing
flaming
falling away from time

Into a deep and ragged love
and the skull as home to passions
hoped for and abandoned

The mythology is wrong, the prophet
will say; the spirit is wrong, the winds
will answer

We will stand somewhere near
and listen, until speech itself
is the greater illusion

What we know is shrouded 
in chaos—much like clouds
appearing to be purposeful in motion

What arises from the dust of change
will make us look for meaning in
the fading echoes of deserted places

As we shape our dreams of finality
in the skeleton of flowers
chiseled by sacred rivers

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Christina Murphy’s poetry is an exploration of consciousness as subjective experience, and her poems appear in a wide range of journals and anthologies, including, in PANK, La Fovea, Dali’s Lovechild, and Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, and in the anthologies Let the Sea Find its Edges, edited by the distinguished Australian poet, Michael Fitzgerald-Clarke, and Remaking Moby-Dick, edited by Trish Harris and published by EU Art Line. Her work has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and for the Best of the Net Anthology.