Hartmann`s camera Poem by Gerard Smyth

It was the year of yeah, yeah, yeah
and hair the length of Christ's.
The ambling horse,
a dray-nag pulling a laden cart
through the centre of the metropolis,
must have been one of the last.


In Erich Hartmann's snaps of Dublin 1964
I see again my father's city of lore:
small boats on the river
and people crossing the bridges,
all weary like the gravediggers
who have shovelled earth


for a burial in the boneyard.
I see again my father's city
of bad old days that were better by far.
Broken ground and jutting chimneys:
his whole universe that vanished
through the aperture of Hartmann's camera.