Writer, Poet, Abuelita, and cat trainer. Sandy has loved writing since she studied the beatnik poets in Marin County in the 1970’s, and, now that she has retired, she has delved into her writing full force. In addition to published short stories and poetry, she writes historical fiction novels set in early America.
The Fidelia McCord Series that takes young Fidelia from 1847 to the midst of the Civil War is complete and available on Amazon. Sandy is currently working on a collection of poems and a new novel, set in the 1950’s in Dalhart, Texas–a story of three very different women forming a friendship and changing with the times.
A graduate of The University of Texas at Austin, she majored in English and French literature. Before retirement, she worked in the field of labor-management relations in Washington, D. C. and was an ESOL teacher for the Fairfax County Public Schools evening classes.
Originally from Glasgow, Delaware, and growing up as a USAF “brat,” she has lived throughout the USA and on islands in both the Pacific and Atlantic. She is a lover of road trips and ceaselessly yearns for sabbaticals in the desert mountains of the Big Bend of west Texas. Ms. Murphy now resides in central Texas but dreams of living in the Davis Mountains.
Wayward
As I sit in the heavy heat
of a Texas summer,
the hot breeze rustles the hollies
and hackberries, a place
so foreign to a coastal girl
who covets the sway of marsh grass
shielding terrapins and avocets
along the Delaware estuary,
where the waxed spike-grass
blooms purple in a summer light
caressed by sea breeze
and burrowed taut in briny muck
where tides ebb, where water
tables rise to cattails I’d once
sparked with a match and swirled
in night. Where muskrat love,
and the mottled leaves of skunk
cabbage slyly fold to prayer.
The sloped land of pickerelweed
and the whimsical buttonbush
with shades of Dr. Seuss,
the drooping sedge cheered
by the yellow petals of hooked buttercup
held midst wool-grass
and rabbitsfoot girdled
in spatterdock floating lush.
Where the medicinal sundew
flourish and feast on flies.
Where, higher and unsalted,
sits Cedar Swamp and Blackbird Creek,
places dark and eerie, once beloved
by the Nanticoke and Lenape
for its palpitating tidewaters
on the Eastern Shore.
Where bog turtles fed
farmers and the early tribes.
Oh, but for the song of a marsh wren
calling me home
where home is no more
but a graveyard at town’s end.
*****
Member of Writers’ League of Texas and of Women Who Write the West
*****
(photo: Beleza Photography)
© 2020 Sandra Fox Murphy. All rights reserved.
