Eric M. Murphy
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ericmmurphy.bsky.social
Eric M. Murphy
@ericmmurphy.bsky.social
1.6K followers 840 following 3.1K 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
Including von Neumann and Morgenstern is a deep cut!

Lovely (and deeply challenging!) lists.
January 21, 2026 at 10:55 PM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
“A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London”
Dylan Thomas

poets.org/poem/refusal...
Never until the mankind making Bird beast and flower Fathering and all humbling darkness Tells with silence the last light breaking And the still hour Is come of the sea tumbling in harness And I must enter again the round Zion of the water bead And the synagogue of the ear of corn Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound Or sow my salt seed In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn The majesty and burning of the child's death. I shall not murder The mankind of her going with a grave truth Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath With any further Elegy of innocence and youth. Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter, Robed in the long friends, The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother, Secret by the unmourning water Of the riding Thames. After the first death, there is no other
January 21, 2026 at 1:19 AM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
It just gets better. Now I have a cup for the classroom and another for my faculty meetings!

Thanks to @effinbirds.com (and Rachel). They get me.
January 19, 2026 at 1:38 AM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
“Dream Song 76”
John Berryman

www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57087/...
Nothin very bad happen to me lately. How you explain that? —I explain that, Mr Bones, terms o' your bafflin odd sobriety. Sober as man can get, no girls, no telephones, what could happen bad to Mr Bones? —If life is a handkerchief sandwich, in a modesty of death I join my father who dared so long agone leave me. A bullet on a concrete stoop close by a smothering southern sea spreadeagled on an island, by my knee. —You is from hunger, Mr Bones, I offers you this handkerchief, now set your left foot by my right foot, shoulder to shoulder, all that jazz, arm in arm, by the beautiful sea, hum a little, Mr Bones. —I saw nobody coming, so I went instead.
January 19, 2026 at 1:36 AM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
Someone who knows me knows my sources of irritation and my answer.
January 14, 2026 at 12:39 AM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
Sunday night when you need clean shirts for work on Mon is quite the party.
January 12, 2026 at 3:01 AM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
Ditto. My memory of her really come from “Dear Brigitte,” which was old when I first saw it. (I love that sequence of movies by Koster featuring Jimmy Stewart.)
December 28, 2025 at 5:58 PM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
I finally finished—delays a testament to time not my own & my own weakness). But I wanted to finish before crossing the line of departure on spring, since I won’t read anything but class material until Apr.

It’s uneven & in places bizarre (unsurprising for the needle it threads)…but excellent.
December 27, 2025 at 3:12 AM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
I think I’ll change the titles on this little shelf each month.

Since I won’t be in the office until after 1 Jan, I’m early. This month, I pulled fiction from home. I limited to one per author. Each is a favorite for one reason or another.
December 23, 2025 at 5:39 PM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
“Robinson”
Weldon Kees

www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47579/...
The dog stops barking after Robinson has gone. His act is over. The world is a gray world, Not without violence, and he kicks under the grand piano, The nightmare chase well under way. The mirror from Mexico, stuck to the wall, Reflects nothing at all. The glass is black. Robinson alone provides the image Robinsonian. Which is all of the room—walls, curtains, Shelves, bed, the tinted photograph of Robinson’s first wife, Rugs, vases, panatellas in a humidor. They would fill the room if Robinson came in. The pages in the books are blank, The books that Robinson has read. That is his favorite chair, Or where the chair would be if Robinson were here. All day the phone rings. It could be Robinson Calling. It never rings when he is here. Outside, white buildings yellow in the sun. Outside, the birds circle continuously Where trees are actual and take no holiday.
December 23, 2025 at 1:12 AM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
“Ballad of Birmingham”
Dudley Randall

www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46562/...
(On the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama, 1963) “Mother dear, may I go downtown Instead of out to play, And march the streets of Birmingham In a Freedom March today?” “No, baby, no, you may not go, For the dogs are fierce and wild, And clubs and hoses, guns and jails Aren’t good for a little child.” “But, mother, I won’t be alone. Other children will go with me, And march the streets of Birmingham To make our country free.” “No, baby, no, you may not go, For I fear those guns will fire. But you may go to church instead And sing in the children’s choir.” She has combed and brushed her night-dark hair, And bathed rose petal sweet, And drawn white gloves on her small brown hands, And white shoes on her feet. The mother smiled to know her child Was in the sacred place, But that smile was the last smile To come upon her face. For when she heard the explosion, Her eyes grew wet and wild. She raced through the streets of Birmingham Calling for her child. She clawed through bits of glass and brick, Then lifted out a shoe. “O, here’s the shoe my baby wore, But, baby, where are you?”
December 20, 2025 at 5:35 PM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
It’s also worth remembering that the bombing campaign was politically necessary. Stalin DEMANDED a second front, the Allies NEEDED to meet that demand, and there were no effective alternatives, since the US could not be ready for a cross-channel invasion in 1943.
December 19, 2025 at 9:34 PM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
I’m not inclined to “lose my shit,” but I am inclined to point to historians like Overy and economists like Tooze. Bombing did NOT do what its advocates claimed it would, but it was also FAR more dispositive than its critics claim.
December 19, 2025 at 9:07 PM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
This jackalope tracked me down on LinkedIn and started his usual nonsense. “Congenital troll,” indeed. Block on sight.
December 16, 2025 at 1:59 AM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
We’ll see how this goes.

Being bullet proof is kinda fun.
December 15, 2025 at 11:14 PM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
“For the One Who Would Take Man’s Life in His Hands”
Delmore Schwartz

allpoetry.com/For-The-One-...
Tiger Christ unsheathed his sword, Threw it down, became a lamb. Swift spat upon the species, but Took two women to his heart. Samson who was strong as death Paid his strength to kiss a slut. Othello that stiff warrior Was broken by a woman's heart. Troy burned for a sea-tax, also for Possession of a charming whore. What do all examples show? What must the finished murderer know? You cannot sit on bayonets, Nor can you eat among the dead. When all are killed, you are alone, A vacuum comes where hate has fed. Murder's fruit is silent stone, The gun increases poverty. With what do these examples shine? The soldier turned to girls and wine. Love is the tact of every good, The only warmth, the only peace. "What have I said?" asked Socrates. "Affirmed extremes, cried yes and no, Taken all parts, denied myself, Praised the caress, extolled the blow, Soldier and lover quite deranged Until their motions are exchanged. -What do all examples show? What can any actor know? The contradiction in every act, The infinite task of the human heart."
December 15, 2025 at 1:14 AM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
Hey @boiler40.bsky.social. Package was delivered by @tyrellmayfield.bsky.social. I deserve none of your largesse…but I’m transported back to my old D&D days by the Lich King. Thank you, sir!
Cans of Zombie Dust beer, with an image that looks like the old-school D&D Lich King.
December 13, 2025 at 1:21 AM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
“Those Winter Sundays”
Robert Hayden

www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert...
Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house, Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?
December 11, 2025 at 2:33 AM
ericmmurphy.bsky.social
“The Fly”
Karl Shapiro

allpoetry.com/poem/8526997...
O hideous little bat, the size of snot, With polyhedral eye and shabby clothes, To populate the stinking cat you walk The promontory of the dead man’s nose, Climb with the fine leg of a Duncan-Phyfe The smoking mountains of my food And in a comic mood In mid-air take to bed a wife. Riding and riding with your filth of hair On gluey foot or wing, forever coy, Hot from the compost and green sweet decay, Sounding your buzzer like an urchin toy— You dot all whiteness with diminutive stool, In the tight belly of the dead Burrow with hungry head And inlay maggots like a jewel. At your approach the great horse stomps and paws Bringing the hurricane of his heavy tail; Shod in disease you dare to kiss my hand Which sweeps against you like an angry flail; Still you return, return, trusting your wing To draw you from the hunter’s reach That learns to kill to teach Disorder to the tinier thing. My peace is your disaster. For your death Children like spiders cup their pretty hands And wives resort to chemistry of war. In fens of sticky paper and quicksands You glue yourself to death. Where you are stuck You struggle hideously and beg, You amputate your leg Imbedded in the amber muck. But I, a man, must swat you with my hate, Slap you across the air and crush your flight, Must mangle with my shoe and smear your blood, Expose your little guts pasty and white, Knock your head sidewise like a drunkard’s hat, Pin your wings under like a crow’s, Tear off your flimsy clothes And beat you as one beats a rat. Then like Gargantua I stride among The corpses strewn like raisins in the dust, The broken bodies of the narrow dead That catch the throat with fingers of disgust. I sweep. One gyrates like a top and falls And stunned, stone blind, and deaf Buzzes its frightful F And dies between three cannibals.
December 5, 2025 at 11:52 PM
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