Eric M. Murphy
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ericmmurphy.bsky.social
Eric M. Murphy
@ericmmurphy.bsky.social
1.6K followers 830 following 3K posts
Birds, Math, Literature, & Airpower. BoD Member @Strategy_Bridge, #Strategy, #Development, #NationalSecurity, #MilitaryAffairs. Repost is not endorsement. Nothing interesting to say.
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ericmmurphy.bsky.social
“What Birds Were There”
Brother Antoninus (William Everson)

www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/willia...
December 3, 2025 at 1:03 AM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
I think I’ll change the titles on this little shelf each month.

Here are a few IR favorites from my shelves at work.
December 1, 2025 at 2:50 PM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
“The Giraffes”
Roy Fuller

allpoetry.com/The-Giraffes
I think before they saw me the giraffes Were watching me. Over the golden grass, The bush and ragged open tree of thorn, From a grotesque height, under their lightish horns, Their eyes fixed on mine as I approached them. The hills behind descended steeply: iron Coloured outcroppings of rock half covered by Dull green and sepia vegetation, dry And sunlit: and above, the piercing blue Where clouds like islands lay or like swans flew. Seen from those hills the scrubby plain is like A large-scale map whose features have a look Half menacing, half familiar, and across Its brightness arms of shadow ceaselessly Revolve. Like small forked twigs or insects move Giraffes, upon the great map where they live. When I went nearer, their long bovine tails Flicked loosely, and deliberately they turned, An undulation of dappled grey and brown, And stood in profile with those curious planes Of neck and sloping haunches. Just as when Quite motionless they watched I never thought Them moved by fear, a desire to be a tree, So as they put more ground between us I Saw evidence that there were animals with Perhaps no wish for intercourse, or no Capacity. Above the falling sun Like visible winds the clouds are streaked and spun, And cold and dark now bring the image of Those creatures walking without pain or love.
November 30, 2025 at 11:46 PM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
“Elegy for a Cricket”
J.V. Cunningham

www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/j-v-cu...
Fifteen nights I have lain awake and called you But you walk ever on and give no answer: Therefore, damned by my sole, go down to hellfire. Spirit luminous and footstep uncertain, You will pace off forever the halls of great Dis. You there, caught in the whirling throng of lovers, If you find in that fire her whom I loved once, Say to her that I gave you but few true words. Say to her that your dreams as her dream held me, Alone, waking, until your friend, the cock, slept. Say to her, if she asks what shoe you wear now, That I gave you my last, I have none other.
November 25, 2025 at 2:09 AM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
“On Inhabiting an Orange”
Josephine Miles

allpoetry.com/On-Inhabitin...
All our roads go nowhere. Maps are curled To keep the pavement definitely On the world. All our footsteps, set to make Metric advance, Lapse into arcs in deference To circumstance. All our journeys nearing Space Skirt it with care, Shying at the distances Present in air. Blithely travel-stained and worn, Erect and sure, All our travels go forth, Making down the roads of Earth Endless detour.
November 24, 2025 at 1:29 AM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
Another rollicking Friday night.
November 22, 2025 at 1:00 AM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
When I was little, we had “The Golden Treasury of Poetry” in the house. It was intended for children, I suppose, but in a way now alien—it treated us as literate, thinking people, capable of reading great poetry.

When I was 10, this was my favorite poem. It’s still easily in my Top 20.
November 20, 2025 at 11:28 PM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
“The Fish”
Elizabeth Bishop

poets.org/poem/fish-2
I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth. He didn’t fight. He hadn’t fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely. Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper, and its pattern of darker brown was like wallpaper: shapes like full-blown roses stained and lost through age. He was speckled with barnacles, fine rosettes of lime, and infested with tiny white sea-lice, and underneath two or three rags of green weed hung down. While his gills were breathing in the terrible oxygen —the frightening gills, fresh and crisp with blood, that can cut so badly— I thought of the coarse white flesh packed in like feathers, the big bones and the little bones, the dramatic reds and blacks of his shiny entrails, and the pink swim-bladder like a big peony. I looked into his eyes which were far larger than mine but shallower, and yellowed, the irises backed and packed with tarnished tinfoil seen through the lenses of old scratched isinglass. They shifted a little, but not to return my stare. —It was more like the tipping of an object toward the light. I admired his sullen face, the mechanism of his jaw, and then I saw that from his lower lip —if you could call it a lip— grim, wet, and weaponlike, hung five old pieces of fish-line, or four and a wire leader with the swivel still attached, with all their five big hooks grown firmly in his mouth. A green line, frayed at the end where he broke it, two heavier lines, and a fine black thread still crimped from the strain and snap when it broke and he got away. Like medals with their ribbons frayed and wavering, a five-haired beard of wisdom trailing from his aching jaw. I stared and stared and victory filled up the little rented boat, from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwarts, the oarlocks on their strings, the gunnels—until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go.
November 20, 2025 at 11:21 PM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
Remiss have I been, as ever, I’m making sure the people for whom I care know that I do. I think maybe I’m just a bad person.

@queenofthinair.bsky.social & @tyrellmayfield.bsky.social…

“Splash, over.”

#GreatPostcardWar2025 #GPW25
November 20, 2025 at 10:24 PM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
“A Newly Discovered ‘Homeric’ Hymn”
—Charles Olson

books.google.com/books?id=jXq...
November 20, 2025 at 2:55 AM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
The last 8 weeks have been sporty—my reading all over the map, crammed into non-existent moments when I could focus, & almost entirely not of my choosing. (Advising 10 masters theses is a neat trick.) But I finally finished this. Like most edited volumes, it’s uneven, but it’s also excellent.
November 19, 2025 at 10:23 PM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
“Christ Walking on the Water”
W.R. Rodgers

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._R._R...
November 16, 2025 at 9:45 PM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
Fun was had.
November 15, 2025 at 10:27 PM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
“What I Expected”
Stephen Spender

www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/92217/...
What I expected, was Thunder, fighting, Long struggles with men And climbing. After continual straining I should grow strong; Then the rocks would shake And I rest long. What I had not foreseen Was the gradual day Weakening the will Leaking the brightness away, The lack of good to touch, The fading of body and soul Smoke before wind, Corrupt, unsubstantial. The wearing of Time, And the watching of cripples pass With limbs shaped like questions In their odd twist, The pulverous grief Melting the bones with pity, The sick falling from earth - These, I could not foresee. Expecting always Some brightness to hold in trust Some final innocence Exempt from dust, That, hanging solid, Would dangle through all Like the created poem, Or the faceted crystal.
November 15, 2025 at 3:00 PM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
“I Have Seen Black Hands”
Richard Wright

www.poetrynook.com/poem/i-have-...
I am black and I have seen black hands, millions and millions of them— Out of millions of bundles of wool and flannel tiny black fingers have reached restlessly and hungrily for life. Reached out for the black nipples at the black breasts of black mothers, And they've held red, green, blue, yellow, orange, white, and purple toys in the childish grips of possession, And chocolate drops, peppermint sticks, lollypops, wineballs, ice cream cones, and sugared cookies in fingers sticky and gummy, And they've held balls and bats and gloves and marbles and jack-knives and sling-shots and spinning tops in the thrill of sport and play And pennies and nickels and dimes and quarters and sometimes on New Year's, Easter, Lincoln's Birthday, May Day, a brand new green dollar bill, They've held pens and rulers and maps and tablets and books in palms spotted and smeared with ink, And they've held dice and cards and half-pint flasks and cue sticks and cigars and cigarettes in the pride of new maturity…
November 15, 2025 at 3:17 AM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
“Variations on Heraclitus”
Louis MacNeice

sententiaeantiquae.com/2021/01/13/v...
Even the walls are flowing, even the ceiling, Nor only in terms of physics; the pictures Bob on each picture rail like floats on a line While the books on the shelves keep reeling Their titles out into space and the carpet Keeps flying away to Arabia nor can this be where I stood — Where I shot the rapids I mean — when I signed On a line that rippled away with a pen that melted Nor can this now be the chair — the chairoplane of a chair — That I sat in the day that I thought I had made up my mind And as for that standard lamp it too keeps waltzing away Down an unbridgeable Ganges where nothing is standard And lights are but lit to be drowned in honour and spite of some dark And vanishing goddess. No, whatever you say, Reappearance presumes disappearance, it may not be nice Or proper or easily analysed not to be static But none of your slide snide rules can catch what is sliding so fast And, all you advisers on this by the time it is that, I just do not want your advice Nor need you be troubled to pin me down in my room Since the room and I will escape for I tell you flat: One cannot live in the same room twice.
November 11, 2025 at 3:08 PM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
“The Bed”
A.D. Hope

chroniclesmagazine.org/vital-signs/...
The doctor loves the patient, The patient loves his bed; A fine place to be born in, The best place to be dead. The doctor loves the patient, Because he means to die; The patient loves the patient bed That shares his agony. The bed adores the doctor, His cool and skilful touch Soon brings another patient Who loves her just as much.
November 11, 2025 at 1:38 AM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
“My Papa’s Waltz”
Theodore Roethke

www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43330/...
The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy. We romped until the pans Slid from the kitchen shelf; My mother’s countenance Could not unfrown itself. The hand that held my wrist Was battered on one knuckle; At every step you missed My right ear scraped a buckle. You beat time on my head With a palm caked hard by dirt, Then waltzed me off to bed Still clinging to your shirt.
November 8, 2025 at 8:06 PM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
I think I’ll change the titles on this little shelf each month.

I get to take students to Gettysburg this month, so here’s a little moment of American Civil War stuff I have handy.
November 4, 2025 at 4:07 PM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
“Foresight”
Lincoln Kirstein

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln...
November 4, 2025 at 2:31 AM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
Sunday night is for football and “Carcassonne of the South Seas.”
November 2, 2025 at 11:10 PM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
I love @99pi.org’s podcast and @romanmars.bsky.social, and I’m glad they’re telling this story, but it reminds me of Stephen Bloom’s “Postville.”

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/9...
October 24, 2025 at 8:55 PM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
I wonder if Stephen Miller’s view of new architecture at the White House is that it look like this:
October 24, 2025 at 8:39 PM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
“Fish in the Unruffled Lakes”
W.H. Auden

allpoetry.com/Fish-in-the-...
Fish in the unruffled lakes Their swarming colours wear, Swans in the winter air A white perfection have, And the great lion walks Through his innocent grove; Lion, fish and swan Act, and are gone Upon Time's toppling wave. We, till shadowed days are done, We must weep and sing Duty's conscious wrong, The Devil in the clock, The goodness carefully worn For atonement or for luck; We must lose our loves, On each beast and bird that moves Turn an envious look. Sighs for folly done and said Twist our narrow days, But I must bless, I must praise That you, my swan, who have All gifts that to the swan Impulsive Nature gave, The majesty and pride, Last night should add Your voluntary love.
October 23, 2025 at 3:06 AM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
I haven’t done the math to know if this is definitionally hyperinflation…but it isn’t good.

Charts show Argentine peso to US dollar exchange rate.

Fiscal and monetary policy so janky it outruns the 2025 US dollar this way is an epic self-own.
October 22, 2025 at 3:21 AM