After Another School Shooting, I Drive the Back Roads of New Hampshire
Deborah Murphy
Late June fields greening under a mottled sky. An oriole slashes orange against a shingled Cape Cod.
Beyond the stone wall, a peeling wooden shed: two dusty lambs pause by an overturned pail.
Soon the wild blueberries should ripen. The Black-eyed Susans may bloom. Soon apple trees and frost
in the hollows. The road silent and long. I stop at the edge of the Souhegan and drop flat stones into the river,
litany for the dead. Soon I will turn back, head for home, where waiting for me is laundry to fold, dinner to make, my son to console.
Deborah Murphy is a poet. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Border Crossing, The Mud Chronicles: A New England Anthology, Adanna Literary Journal (print version), and other journals. Holding a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and an MA from Tufts University, she lives in Amherst, NH, where she is an editor at Smoky Quartz literary journal.