Gerard Smyth

Side by side

September Song

Autumn has come stripping the trees
to make them look like an army in defeat.
Soon everything will appear bereft,
even the girls on the street in décolletage
and canal swans nesting by the side of the bridge:
A pair of them in a swan-marriage,
schooled to be faithful companions.

Roads are brimming with slow-motion traffic
going out of the city, home to the foothills,
to time in the garden pulling weeds,
the Hollywood epic on late-night TV:
the one with the long list of etceteras
scrolled in haste before we turn over
in the double bed of brass reflections.

Gerard Smyth

(Ireland, 1951)

Gerard Smyth was born in Dublin in 1951. His first two books were published by the New Writers’ Press when he was eighteen years old. His main collections are World Without End; Loss and Gain; Painting the Pink Roses Black; Daytime Sleeper; A New Tenancy; and The Mirror Tent. His selected poems will be published in 2009. For most of his professional career he has worked as a journalist with The...