Poems by Gerry Murphy

Temporary Abdication

You wake,
to a cloud of unknowing,
a blizzard of lost connections,
all slates truly wiped clean.
You cannot tell
where you are,
you cannot tell
who you are.
Embalmed in a moment,
without past or future,
name or memory,
need or desire.
Until the panic kicks in
and the accumulation of identity,
the mad pursuit of meaning,
the scramble for signifiers,
promptly return.
The whole shebang
rushing back into place,
fitting you out
with the same stale details,
name, location, time, date,
occupation, social position,
likes, dislikes…
The sprawling entity,
the tiny ungovernable kingdom:
you.



​
Glimpse

Counting the takings
in the inner office,
when the light 
reflecting from the coins
dazzles me briefly
and I become convinced
that I am momentarily transported
to a former incarnation
as a minor official
of the Tax Gatherer Royal
to the Court of King Gilgamesh,
who is simultaneously convinced
that he is living
in an unimaginable future
with digital calculators.

​
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Born in Cork in 1952, Gerry Murphy has spent one year in a Kibbutz in Israel in 1975/76 and one year at UCC studying English and History. He started work as a lifeguard Mayfield swimming pool in 1980. His poetry collections include A Small Fat Boy Walking Backwards (1985, 1992) and five previous collections from Dedalus, Rio de la Plata and All That (1993), The Empty Quarter (1995), Extracts from the Lost Log-Book of Christopher Columbus (1999), Torso of an Ex-Girlfriend (2002), End of Part One: New and Selected Poems (2006), and My Flirtation with International Socialism (2010). In 1987 American playwright Roger Gregg produced a stage adaptation of Murphy's poetry in the Triskel Arts Centre, Cork. Murphy participated in the Southword Editions' translation series for Cork European Capital of Culture in 2005, working with poems by Katarzyna Borun-Jagodzinska in her book, Pocket Apocalypse. Murphy's latest collection of original work is Muse (Dedalus, 2015). 

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