A poem by brother Dave Murphy, all rights reserved,Copyright © 2025.




Saint George

As the memory has it,
It was a cold winter morning,
I must have been about eight or nine,
It would have been about seven am,
And I was tucked up in bed,
No heating in the flat,
Condensation in the flat,
Frost on the window,
And the coughing, spluttering of a car,
Being cranked up in the street outside,
And he had to be at work at the Bank by nine,
And had to drive to the station,
And take a train.

I guess he was about thirty-five,
But I'm seventy-one this year,
What do I know of when I was a child?

I've been reading about Saint George,
Saint George never existed,
He was just another dragon,
Trying to assuage his own fire,
His burning desire to do wrong,
As he sought to serve God,
Sought to be a disciple of the Lord.

Memory can be very selective,
Like myths,
We choose the ones that help us survive.
They are not made of thoughts,
They are dream-stuff. As a dream of a child,
And a man cranking up his car,
Or as a dream that is a
Wild riot of demons in coloured, ghastly shapes,
That kicks you awake in the dawn,
Leaving you frightened to go back to sleep,
And the subtle devil creeps into your space,
And things seem tremendous and tragic.
Stuff that only seeps into our mind now and then,
But leaves me too dumbstruck to speak.









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