Poem

Richard Murphy

Side by side

Moonshine

To think
I must be alone:
To love
We must be together.

I think I love you
When I’m alone
More than I think of you
When we’re together.

I cannot think
Without loving
Or love
Without thinking.

Alone I love
To think of us together:
Together I think
I’d love to be alone.

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 ...