Writer, Poet, Abuelita, and cat trainer, Sandra has loved writing since she studied the beatnik poets in Marin County in the 1970’s. She’s published short stories and poetry as well as six 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. Her novel, The Dalhart Girls, is set in the 1950’s in Dalhart, Texas–a story of three very different women forming a friendship and changing with the times.
She has published poems in Aging Without Grace, and has been published in The Ocotillo Review, The Write Launch, the Sandy River Review, and others to include anthologies. She is grateful to have been invited to be the Poet Laura at Tweetspeak Poetry from late 2024 through October 2025.
A graduate of The University of Texas at Austin, she majored in English and French literature. Originally from Glasgow, Delaware, and growing up as a USAF “brat,” Sandra resides in central Texas but dreams of living in the Davis Mountains.
Member of Writers’ League of Texas
Member of Women Writing the West
Member of the Historical Novel Society
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.
