Moon Country
New and Selected Poems
by
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In Moon Country, poet Michael E. Murphy gives us joyous epiphanies of dailiness and memory, affirming that our truest home is with those we love. A sample: Here is his Palm Springs Writers Guild prize-winning poem, "Pity the Plumeria Tree."
Pity the poor plumeria tree:
no white petals again this year;
and again its green, oblong leaves
fall before their prime, expose
its skeletal frame like a desert fossil.
We hadn’t asked all that much
of the plumeria---neither the shade
nor the elegance the others give---
only that it be a privacy screen
between our patio and the passersby.
Perhaps it thinks itself the orphan
we’d adopted, the child with atavistic
traits we could not recognize, the one
whom teachers sent home with notes,
the kid who missed the open goal,
the young man who left for the hills
with The Wanderers---the son
for whom we’d kill the fatted calf
if only he’d come back home to us,
be the new leaf on our plumeria tree.
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About the Book
Pity the Plumeria Tree Pity the poor plumeria tree: no white petals again this year; and again its green, oblong leaves fall before their prime, expose its skeletal frame like a desert fossil. We hadn’t asked all that much of the plumeria---neither the shade nor the elegance the others give--- only that it be a privacy screen between our patio and the passersby. Perhaps it thinks itself the orphan we’d adopted, the child with atavistic traits we could not recognize, the one whom teachers sent home with notes, the kid who missed the open goal, the young man who left for the hills with The Wanderers---the son for whom we’d kill the fatted calf if only he’d come back home to us, be the new leaf on our plumeria tree. In his Moon Country poems, Michael E. Murphy spirits the reader off to exotic places like Iguazu Falls, the Bolshoi Theatre, Galleons Lap, the Ogasawara archipelago in the western Pacific and back to drier ground in the Cholla Gardens of Joshua Tree Park. On the wings of these and other poetic flights, the reader accompanies Murphy as he comes of age in St. Paul, raises a family and develops an international business law practice in Minneapolis, then returns in retirement to St. Paul—and to California’s Coachella Valley to write his life stories. For that’s what these Moon Country poems are—stories. The word poem comes from the Greek poiesis, the act of creating or imagining something, like a story. Murphy invites readers to relive his life with him through these little stories, these Moon Country poems.
About the Author
Michael E. Murphy taught English briefly at St. Olaf and Macalester Colleges before embarking on a thirty-year career as an international business lawyer with Medtronic and the Faegre law firm in Minneapolis. He lives with his wife, Jane, in St. Paul.