Richard Murphy

Side by side

MANGOES

A colourful boy in Star Wars T-shirt
and a saffron batik sarong
tightrope-walking along a mango tree’s
top branches
figurine fired in the midday sun
is raining down on the parched red earth
glittering hard green fruit.

Seeing you focus binoculars
to pick him out
as a black-headed oriole of Ceylon
for your notebook’s cage
he shins down the trunk embracingly
to bring you a gift of mangoes robbed
with a tartly negotiable smile.

Richard Murphy

(Ireland, 1927 - 2018)

Richard Murphy was born eighty years ago in the West of Ireland into a Protestant Ascendancy family. He spent much of his early childhood in Ceylon where his father worked in the British colonial service. He was educated at a variety of mostly British private schools and at Oxford where he was tutored by CS Lewis. He later studied at the Sorbonne and taught. In the early Fifties he returned to ...