ROGER MURPHY: TALKING OF MICHELANGELO

Detail from Day of Judgment by Michelangelo Wikimedia Commons

---

Roger Murphy is a poet whose work interrogates the gulf between private feeling and public expression, between the enormity of human suffering and the polite silences with which we so often meet it. Born in Dublin in 1955 and raised in England, Murphy’s path has been an unusual one: a Junior Exhibition to the Royal College of Music at eleven, a deliberate turn away from professional music at nineteen, and a long career designing publications for some of the world’s largest companies, alongside lecturing on design across America, the UK and Europe. When the Covid-19 pandemic broke out, Murphy enrolled at Birkbeck College, University of London, graduating with a first in Creative Writing. In Talking of Michelangelo, Murphy draws on T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock to test the moral weight of silence. Against a backdrop of visceral, unflinching imagery, including “the flensed skin stripped from…dripped from…“, he sets the tourist’s idle chatter, and the blank inexpressiveness of statues. What does it means to witness atrocity, when our reticence negates and numbs the very compassion we profess?

Ars Notoria

Talking of Michelangelo*

You might ask if we care
About the death, the destruction,
The orange rain,
the perpetrating, the suppurating,
About the heaving horror,
of pulverised flesh.
The screaming, eviscerated women
The excoriated, castrated men,
The lacerated flesh
The flensed skin stripped from…dripped from…
Presented, like the sheet in the Sistine chapel,
Hanging limply from Bartholemew’s hand –
As tourists come and go
Talking of Michelangelo

You might ask if we care.
Oh yes, you will reply.
We care.

But list to the silence.
Echoing in the vast spaces of our hearts, our minds
I cannot hear your caring in your voice in the darkness
Or see it expressed in your impenetrable subterranean eyes,
All light subsumed into the choking stygian air of silence.
Figures from San Agustin
Buried in the deep delvëd earth
To be denied light
To commune only with the underworld.
Did they care?

We cannot shout
Cannot scream,
Even when our view teems
With the very moment.
We are as silent as
The solemn family groups
Of the Colombian necropolis.

---

Maybe our way is not extreme,
Like the events we may (we say) care about.
Maybe that’s the thing we feel we should do
Turn our backs on the very nature of the
Things we are horrified by.
Don’t join in. Don’t echo.
Don’t imbue.

Don’t show we care.
If we did,
Maybe it would be all for show.
Or maybe it would reveal
What we are devoid of –
Passion, expression, feeling.
The ability to articulate our sadness.

Numbing ourselves to numberless excess
What we have to show is, perhaps,
Only a blank inexpressiveness.

We swallow down our care
Emit only the undertow
Keep perfect a surface unperturbed
By inexpressible events.
And by doing so
Do we negate them?
As tourists come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

You might ask if we care
About the death, the destruction,
The orange rain,
the perpetrating, the suppurating,
About the heaving horror
of pulverised flesh.
The screaming, eviscerated women,
The excoriated, castrated men,
The lacerated flesh
The flensed skin stripped from…dripped from…
Presented, like the sheet in the Sistine chapel,
Hanging limply from Bartholemew’s hand –

You might ask if we care.

Oh yes, you will reply.
We care greatly.

As tourists come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

*The phrase ‘Talking of Michelangelo’ is a quote from TS Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.

---