Onyx

About the Book

This is the sound ideas and dreams make when laboring through darkness; in corners, in candlelight, among shadows and barely breathing, what we really are, what we aspire to be, can oftentimes suffocate under the heavy hand of experience. And even though these are my experiences, and their relation to my dreams and ideals, “Onyx” would be a useless piece of vanity should you not be able to find within it some reflection of yourself. We all have our time in the dark. We all struggle from time to time between the seen and unseen. If you are going to read this, keep a pure, innocent mind open; cast off cynicism and suspend your disbelief, for this was the spirit with which it was born. After all, what dream or aspiration was ever first breathed in the realm of rational thought? These are poems of solitary life-the only life we can be certain of-and how that life relates to what surrounds us: the sense-based temporal as metaphors for the hidden eternal. For there is an eternal language in the Things around us, the strange silent creatures of Nature; and within us, the dreams and thoughts that, even in our maturity, still live and breathe as our claim on divinity and the vital parts of who we are. I appeal to those Things in and around you, the echoing voices sometimes muffled by the smothering cloaks of duty, convention and ignorance, by which you now live, I live. And as I write this, I am reminded that there are some of you who share this worldview, and to you I give thanks and honor. It is you who often inspire me simply by your existence. In your perplexity I find similitude and in your longsuffering I find hope.

About the Author

James Christopher Murray was born on March 1, 1969. Raised in the town of Scullville, New Jersey, his educational years were spent in mathematics. It wasn’t until his twenty-third year-after he had already abandoned college-that, upon reading William Blake’s poem “To Autumn”, literature caught his attention. He immediately tried his hand at poetry and returned to school to study creative writing. In poetic language he seemed to have finally found a way to understand the complexities of inner life and simplicity of Nature, and in its authors saw reflections of what he always saw in himself. His first published poem, “To Angel”, an echo of the above mentioned Blake poem, appeared in a literary publication a year later, and in 1996 the title piece for this book was written. It wasn’t until 1998 that he started to arrange pieces for a collection that, as you see before you now, became “Onyx”.