Poem

Because I Heard About the Harp

I lived within the blast of barley tendril steam,
a hoppy smell, with hints of roasted grain,
as regular as the shifts that worked the clock.

Huge glass panes shielded copper tuns
from the purple gaze of Slieve Gullion
at the end of the train track that ran on into the Gap

of the North and up the frilled green
valleys to no-surrender-land.
Up there students drank it by the bucket,

down here, we called it Harpic and swilled our bellies
full in Russell’s Lounge as Echo & the Bunnymen
belted our weekends into submission.

The question then, was could it quench a thirst
as cleanly as it might after a salt-blue cycle
down the Navvy bank – my stomach knew

no better – wobbling back up tidy streets
of red-brick houses yielding sun-baked eddies:
abandoning a racer in a dim AOH hall

and pulling out a table and four chairs
to a sunlit square no bigger than the table;
how daft we all were, long before Diageo.

Barbara Smith
Dundalk, Ireland

Barbara Smith lives on the east coast of Ireland. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Queen’s University, Belfast. Barbara’s awards for poetry include the Annie Deeny Memorial Prize, awarded by the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Ireland. She was a prize winner at Scotland’s Wigtown Poetry Competition 2009.

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