Abby E. Murray: “As the next administration unveiled its picks for senior leadership and cabinet positions this week, I was especially struck by the terrible choice for a defense secretary: a man who has a history of demonizing any life that doesn’t closely mirror his own. Most of my daily work involves examining and bridging the canyons that divide military & civilian populations, and I am imagining how much harder it’s going to be next year. I wrote this poem as a way to connect my pacifist life to the lives of service members in danger. Happy veterans day indeed.” (web)
Abby E. Murray: “This poem is what I feel my gut saying every time I wish for peace in the new year, especially this year, as it culminates in more war and uncertainty than last year. I imagine this new year as the mother of our future, listening to our prayers for peace that remain unfollowed by action. She wants us to get off our asses and make the peace we need ourselves.” (web)
Abby E. Murray: “My nine-year-old recently asked me point-blank if it was worth it to grow up in “such a cruel world” and I really didn’t know how to answer. Her point was that the violence and grief of living today might be beyond overwhelming, but I couldn’t help also noting the profound impact of kindness on the same world. And who are we to say with certainty that a deeply humane commitment to one another isn’t as old as our willingness to destroy? Kindness may be nearby all the time, even if we can’t see it; Wednesday’s blue supermoon was the perfect vehicle for me to finally try answering my daughter’s question about all the energy it takes to keep going right now.” (web)
Abby E. Murray: “I wrote this while sitting outside my daughter’s school, waiting to pick her up from engineering club where they learn to make balloon-powered cars and popsicle-stick catapults in a world armed with steel and fire. All the children killed at a school in Tennessee this week were the same age as her. That morning, the Washington Post offered in-depth coverage of ‘The Blast Effect,’ or what happens inside a child’s body when an AR-15 round pierces it, because it is considered ‘critical to public knowledge,’ and I suppose they’re right. We, as a public, are being ignored by government officials who do not care how many times a day we’re forced to imagine our own children dying, or worse, experience it. We are being shown how to picture it more vividly, how to maintain ourselves as part of the problem. My own hope can sometimes feel small as a dry kernel; my daughter’s hope, which is expansive and certain, is what might save it.” (web)
Abby E. Murray: “I write poetry because it is the only thing I have been able to take with me everywhere I’ve been sent. I also enjoy it. As Marvin Bell said, I write poems ‘because it feels so good.’” (web)
Abby E. Murray: “I was talking to a friend the other night about how, whenever anything painful or sad happens on a national scale in Britain, there’s a part of me that is, for a fraction of a second, surprised—like I’ve grown to expect ineptitude and blatant disregard for humanity in the U.S., and seeing it in Britain is about as unsettling as seeing my mother drunk (which is, for the record, about as likely as me seeing the Queen herself show up at my house in the wee hours, blitzed). Even heat waves brought about by man-made climate change, which affect us all, are being spoken about as wholly unanticipated in Britain. So I’m kind of making fun of my sense of problematic surprise, even as I move to correct it.” (web)
Abby E. Murray: “I was in the middle of writing about joy and who has the rights to it when it happens to them when I saw Dmitry Kokh’s photos of polar bears inhabiting the abandoned weather station/village on Kolyuchin, an island in the Chukchi Sea. They poke their heads out of the windows to get a look at the camera, which was mounted on a drone. They sniff the air. They sit on their bums in the grass. They curl up like dogs. Every time I see polar bears I think about how we are killing them, but damn, they look happy right now! My writing turned into this meditation on joy in the face of so many crises, even when it is gratitude for a blue sky in the midst of bomb cyclones, nor’easters, and climate change.” (web)
