An only child, he cadged a lift to Knock Bridge

on the bar of a bike,

the older boys pegged along the high edge

of the nearby Bann pursuing the killer pike.

Being a spoilsport, he had a taste

for something easier when they said the roach

would throw themselves at his feet,

were so crushed he could, without reproach,

walk their burnished spines, a path of seething light

over the Cusher. And sure enough, a bare hook

cast midstream and he was pulling them out right,

left and centre with that look

of utter surprise so common to the mainstream.

He didn’t throw them back;

instead, filled his keepnet with perch, bream

and tarnished roach, and following the beaten track

across the flat strip of Armagh clay,

released the teeming shoals into the Bann like

treasure spilled, one or two trips that day

all it took to kill the hunger on the pike.

　

Howard Wright