Seamus Heaney

Testimony

‘We were killing pigs when the Yanks arrived. A Tuesday morning, sunlight And gutter-blood Outside the slaughter house. >From the main road They would have heard the screaming, Then heard it stop and had

Limbo

Fishermen at Ballyshannon Netted an infant last night Along with the salmon. An illegitimate spawning, A small one thrown back To the waters. But I’m sure As she stood in the shallows Ducking him

Mid-Term Break

I sat all morning in the college sick bay Counting bells knelling classes to a close. At two o’clock our neighbors drove me home. In the porch I met my father crying He had

Follower

My father worked with a horse-plough, His shoulders globed like a full sail strung Between the shafts and the furrow. The horse strained at his clicking tongue. An expert. He would set the wing

Casualty

I He would drink by himself And raise a weathered thumb Towards the high shelf, Calling another rum And blackcurrant, without Having to raise his voice, Or order a quick stout By a lifting

Twice Shy

Her scarf a la Bardot, In suede flats for the walk, She came with me one evening For air and friendly talk. We crossed the quiet river, Took the embankment walk. Traffic holding its

Requiem for the Croppies

The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley… No kitchens on the run, no striking camp… We moved quick and sudden in our own country. The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp. A

The Otter

When you plunged The light of Tuscany wavered And swung through the pool From top to bottom. I loved your wet head and smashing crawl, Your fine swimmer’s back and shoulders Surfacing and surfacing

The Grauballe Man

As if he had been poured In tar, he lies On a pillow of turf And seems to weep The black river of himself. The grain of his wrists Is like bog oak, The

Anahorish

My “place of clear water,” The first hill in the world Where springs washed into The shiny grass And darkened cobbles In the bed of the lane. Anahorish, soft gradient Of consonant, vowel-meadow, After-image

Strange Fruit

Here is the girl’s head like an exhumed gourd. Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth. They unswaddled the wet fern of her hair And made an exhibition of its coil, Let the air at her

Blackberry-Picking

Late August, given heavy rain and sun For a full week, the blackberries would ripen. At first, just one, a glossy purple clot Among others, red, green, hard as a knot. You ate that

Exposure

It is December in Wicklow: Alders dripping, birches Inheriting the last light, The ash tree cold to look at. A comet that was lost Should be visible at sunset, Those million tons of light

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pin rest; snug as a gun. Under my window, a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: My father, digging. I look down

Song

A rowan like a lipsticked girl. Between the by-road and the main road Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance Stand off among the rushes. There are the mud-flowers of dialect And the

Personal Helicon

As a child, they could not keep me from wells And old pumps with buckets and windlasses. I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss. One,

The Harvest Bow

As you plaited the harvest bow You implicated the mellowed silence in you In wheat that does not rust But brightens as it tightens twist by twist Into a knowable corona, A throwaway love-knot

Death Of A Naturalist

All year the flax-dam festered in the heart Of the townland; green and heavy headed Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods. Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun. Bubbles gargled delicately,

The Perch

Perch on their water perch hung in the clear Bann River Near the clay bank in alder dapple and waver, Perch they called ‘grunts’, little flood-slubs, runty and ready, I saw and I see

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore, In September or October, when the wind And the light are working off each other So that

Docker

There, in the corner, staring at his drink. The cap juts like a gantry’s crossbeam, Cowling plated forehead and sledgehead jaw. Speech is clamped in the lips’ vice. That fist would drop a hammer

The Tollund Man

I Some day I will go to Aarhus To see his peat-brown head, The mild pods of his eye-lids, His pointed skin cap. In the flat country near by Where they dug him out,

From The Frontier Of Writing

The tightness and the nilness round that space When the car stops in the road, the troops inspect Its make and number and, as one bends his face Towards your window, you catch sight

Keeping Going

The piper coming from far away is you With a whitewash brush for a sporran Wobbling round you, a kitchen chair Upside down on your shoulder, your right arm Pretending to tuck the bag

The Early Purges

I was six when I first saw kittens drown. Dan Taggart pitched them, ‘the scraggy wee shits’, Into a bucket; a frail metal sound, Soft paws scraping like mad. But their tiny din Was

Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication

1. Sunlight There was a sunlit absence. The helmeted pump in the yard Heated its iron, Water honeyed In the slung bucket And the sun stood Like a griddle cooling Against the wall Of

Act of Union

I To-night, a first movement, a pulse, As if the rain in bogland gathered head To slip and flood: a bog-burst, A gash breaking open the ferny bed. Your back is a firm line

Rite of Spring

So winter closed its fist And got it stuck in the pump. The plunger froze up a lump In its throat, ice founding itself Upon iron. The handle Paralysed at an angle. Then the

Lovers on Aran

The timeless waves, bright, sifting, broken glass, Came dazzling around, into the rocks, Came glinting, sifting from the Americas To posess Aran. Or did Aran rush To throw wide arms of rock around a

Bogland

for T. P. Flanagan We have no prairies To slice a big sun at evening Everywhere the eye concedes to Encrouching horizon, Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye Of a tarn. Our unfenced country