The green light is a traffic light now,
and across the bay is an amusement park
where a Ferris wheel glows in evening light—
not the new world you once envisioned.
Everything changes and often is less than
we hoped for; but you didn’t accept that,
did you?
You, who believed the past did not matter
because it could be remade by the heart’s longings;
and the future could be wished for so strongly
that it could become its own beautiful reality—
the green light of dreams, holy imaginings,
a passageway through time toward an eternally rising sun.
Christina Murphy’s poems appear in a wide range of journals and anthologies, including, PANK, Dali’s Lovechild, La Fovea, and Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, and the anthologies From the Roaring Deep: A Devotional in Honor of Poseidon and the Spirits of the Sea, Let the Sea Find its Edges, and Remaking Moby-Dick. Her work has been nominated multiples times for the Pushcart Prize and for the Best of the Net anthology.