Live Encounters Poetry & Writing September 2026
Three Propellers, poems by Ian Watson.
Three Propellers
At the ‘immersive’ Titanic Experience Exhibition, Hamburg, June 2025
A chilling thought that if grandfather Stuart
had not caught a fever, he’d be under the ocean.
Full fathom two thousand the answer lies.
Headhunted, for the yard was well behind time,
he spoke of the three propellers he fitted
and the four apprentices he lost.
In the dry dock beside the three propellers,
a baker’s dozen of flat hats admire their work.
I imagine him among them, but the image is too faint.
I have stood twice where he once did,
deep down in that dry dock, full fathoms four,
and closed my eyes to hear them all, muffled:
the clanging, the caulkers, the shouting,
the riveters’ hammers, the foremen’s curses,
and Gandan’s floundering apprentices.
On his mother’s side, Stuart was a Sloan from Straid.
We read of the first-class stewardess Mary Jane Sloan,
born just a couple of miles away from there.
At the ‘Experience’ each is given a passenger to ‘be’;
and Mary Jane Sloan, the servant who survived,
turned out to be Stuart’s great-granddaughter Hannah.
Bibelgarten
And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed … (Genesis, I, 11)
Sankt Jakobus welcomes me on his plinth:
Santiago, the patron saint of pilgrims and migrants,
with his round-knobbed staff and his
flappy hat and his bones in La Compostela.
The Bremen Bible Garden is a symbol:
God’s no-charge dispensary. The herbs
are said to be the fragrance of the gospel,
healing the pilgrims’ cholic and blisters.
Like Friar’s Bush Graveyard in Belfast,
home of the Famine and cholera dead,
a high-walled park gives me shelter to think.
His statue offers me a corner to write.
He knows I am the only pilgrim here
by the red-brick nave of our Cathedral,
sucking a pen in my voluntary exile;
hiking along from line to stanza.
Only twenty yards behind my back
is the city’s gross spaghetti junction:
roaring buses, squeaking points and
rattling trams now just a distant soundtrack.
But the patron of herbs is really Fiachra, an Irish monk.
I think of him as I write; the prototype emigré.
Now I am as far from home as ever he was
from those beehive huts of Sceilg Mhór.
But today my poet’s pilgrimage is a cul-de-sac;
the lines will not come. My wooden bench is cold;
there is no topsoil to feed my muse.
And, so, for the sake of a weedy rhyme,
I sip my lukewarm coffee in full view
of parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme.
Surfing Home
Everybody has their Forthlin Road (Paul McCartney, 2026)
Donegall Place in 1920; Arthur Square in snow
Coal boats in the Abercorn Basin, no date
Castle Arcade, Brand’s Arcade, a trolleybus
The blond one at the back there, third from the left …
My great grandfather had a butchers shop next door …
Sandstone Edwardian department stores
George Best as a prefect at Lisnasharragh School
Ruby Murray and the Rolling Stones
In them days, the floors all had to be scrubbed …
My Granny used to work their too, so she did …
A Methodist College Rugby First Fifteen
Phil Lynott outside the Opera House
Campbell College after the Blitz
Just behind that was the shop where my Ma …
I knew Joss very well he had a great voice …
Yanks in Royal Avenue on VE Day
Mill chimneys and people’s parents’ weddings
Dodgems and long-gone lounge bars
Does anybody know about what happened to …
Can anybody help me …
Uch, I must stop stop scouring the net at night
for Facebook ‘Images and Memories’ of home.
They’re all flat caps and Troubles and bowler hats;
The city is just a creepy black and white.
© Ian Watson
Ian Watson is originally from Belfast but lives in Bremen, Germany. He is the author of two poetry collections in English: Riverbank City (Blaupause Verlag, 2013) and Granny’s Interpreter (Salmon Poetry 2016). His poems have been published in magazines and anthologies in Ireland, Britain, Germany and the United States, and his recent German-language non-fiction includes Spielfelder: eine Fußballmigration, on football and identity, and Bremen erlesen, a literary and cultural guide to his second-home city in Germany (both with Edition Falkenberg).
He also publishes translations of poetry from and into German and English. He has worked regularly for radio and made the film Cool to be Celtic on Irish popular music for German and French television (arte 1999). After twenty years, he has recently retired as vice-chairman of the Literaturhaus Bremen, is a member of the British Poetry Society and active in their Germany Stanza group. His first novel, East Antrim, is complete and up for offers.