The View from St Augustine Street Poem by Gerard Smyth

And did you make the journey

to see the view from St Augustine Street,

where the factory horn went silent long ago?



Did you arrive somewhere between

a treasure trove of the city's corner stones

and junkyard debris from its broken homes?



There, a shadow might stab you in the back,

the vicious tongue had no kind words to speak.

There was a man who swept the street,



his brush kept finding things that people dropped,

and a man who thought he was a real gunslinger,

who aimed his front door key and shot



those who looked familiar and those who were not -

his life was one long cowboy film,

days crossing the frontier of his own Wild West.

He became a legend on St Augustine Street.