Continuing my deluge of poems in advance for the launch of Hedge Songs next week , here is another piece written for last week's "Wonderful Wander." It was great that my mate and fellow poet Jim Deeds was able to be back wandering with us this year, though we retained the services of Dr. Mylie Brennan to keep our facts straight and the average age down! As the three of us talked over the route in advance it was again interesting to note the different and similar perspectives of our city between Jim and me, him being brought up in the west as a Catholic and me an east Belfast Prod. Both our households got our "lemonade" from the "Maine Man" (see yesterday's poem), but as we talked about the Ormeau Road where we would come out of the Gasworks, he reminded me that in various parts of the city, including at this junction, in the "bad old days" the side of the road you walked on led to a presumption of whether you were a catholic of a protes...
As I continue preparations for the launch of my new collection of poetry, here is another piece that won't be in it, but perhaps might find its way into a future one. It's somewhat more light-hearted than the past few that I have posted and was written specifically for the annual Wonderful Wander that forms part of the 4 Corners Festival. This year, following this year's theme of "Journey" we took our crowd of "Wanderers" from the old Central Station (now renamed Lanyon Place) to the huge new Belfast Grand Central Station, via the Lagan towpath and Gasworks. As we turned off the towpath into the Gasworks we paused at the sculpture known as "The Bolt". It is actually a huge representation of an early screwtop, designed to celebrate the huge mineral water industry that used to exist in Belfast, linked to the massive Belfast whiskey industry – at one time producing more whiskey than anywhere else in the world, until American Prohibition killed it...