Roscommon Town Then

My Roscommon is gone since the seventies. Town

of small shops: Finns, Morris’s, Smiths and Kerrigan’s.

Main Street: Raleigh bicycles leaning against the houses,

open hall doors, shop awnings, fair days and processions,

aroma of fresh bread mixed with fresh print from Nelly

Higgins’, rolls of fabrics in Donnellan’s old shop,

Anglias, Prefects, Wolseleys, Zephyrs and Cortinas,

scarved heads, flat caps, walking sticks, evening papers.

Behind the shops another world full of magic and mystery,

exotic haunts and hideaways. Storehouses, disused stables,

barns, slaughterhouses, grain-stores, tumble-down sheds,

ancient gardens, abandoned workers’ cottages and these

filled with the wrecked remains of more distant civilisations.

Skeletons of mangles, weighing scales, churns, carts, battered

display cabinets, old counters, rusted motors, bicycles, prams,

assorted crockery, old glassware, scattered ledgers and coins.

Not now, the old street picked clean as a fish-bone on both sides;

the mysteries long forgotten under the sprawling car-parks, new 

entrances and that dull predictability of modern shopping developments.