Author Spotlight • KVI Editorial Reflection
Phillip Joseph Murray
The Coming
A reflection on birth, arrival, memory, belonging, and becoming.
Contributor Spotlight
About Phillip Joseph Murray
Phillip Joseph Murray is a writer, published poet, songwriter, musician, and calypsonian. His contributor bio also identifies him as a national short-story winner. His books include Begorrat Hill and Strange Village Tales. His creative life moves between poetry, storytelling, music, and performance.
Issue 3 • April — Create
A Beginning Before We Know Its Name
“The Coming” belongs naturally in a chapter about awakening and beginnings. It takes us into the first passage from protection into experience, where fear and tenderness arrive almost at the same moment.
Personal Reflection • Vo Thi Nhu Mai (V.T.N.M.)
What I Hear in “The Coming”
When I read Murray’s poem, I do not stay only with the image of birth. I think about every beginning that asks us to leave one kind of shelter before we understand the place waiting on the other side. The poem begins with “warm comforting closeness,” and that small phrase immediately brings me to the feeling of home: not simply a location, but the first place where we are held, known, and protected.
Then comes the line, “This new world is cold.” For me, that is where the poem opens beyond birth. Much of my own writing, including “Before Dawn Arrives”, returns to memory, distance, belonging, and the feeling of moving between worlds. There are moments in life when the familiar becomes distant and the unfamiliar becomes necessary. We step forward before we feel ready. We carry one world inside us while learning how to live in another.
I was also drawn to “tear-filled laughter.” That image holds two emotions without asking either one to disappear. Joy does not erase pain. Pain does not cancel love. I recognize that tension because poetry often lives exactly there, in the space where opposite feelings are true at the same time.
What stays with me most is the final sense of companionship. The speaker enters a difficult world, but not an empty one. There is a voice. There is a mother. There is a promise that the journey will be faced together. To me, that is the quiet heart of the poem. Becoming does not mean forgetting where we began. Sometimes we survive the new world because we still carry the first song with us.
Editorial Appreciation
Why the Poem Works
Murray builds the poem through contrasts: warmth and cold, shelter and exposure, fear and reassurance, pain and joy. The movement is simple but emotionally layered. Birth becomes both a literal event and a metaphor for transition, allowing readers to recognize their own moments of arrival, separation, and renewal. Readers can continue that theme of change in “The Metamorphosis of Time.”
Krafty Page ChronicleS • Issue 3
Featured in Issue 3
Phillip Joseph Murray’s “The Coming” is part of the evolving editorial world of Krafty Page ChronicleS Issue 3.