Divining

In the portacabin that morning, men smoked
and looked at last week’s paper again.
There was no water to fill the urn.
The first job – to get connected

to water and power. A slow hour went by
of dirtied cards landing on the table.
I was less than a year out of school.
This is what work was going to be.

The foreman stamped in demanding to know
why no work was done. ‘No water. No cement,’
he was informed. The foreman stamped out
and through the perspex window we saw

him snap two thin branches from a dead tree.
‘Right, lazy bastards, after me!’

Boots shuffled on the cement-dust floor.
Roll-ups were folded into ashtrays.
The foreman held the branches.
I followed the men through the door.

The hunched back of his reflective jacket
turned to the east, to the south, to the east
again, until he tapped a current
strong enough to set the rods twitching.

The rods crossed and we all stood around,
until somebody lifted a shovel
and started to dig for the pipe that held
living water in the living ground.

Mark Ryan Smith lives in the Shetland Islands