Twice Shy by Seamus Heaney
Twice Shy by Seamus Heaney 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 breath, Sky a tense diaphragm: Dusk hung like a backcloth That shook where a swan swam, […]
The Tollund Man by Seamus Heaney
The Tollund Man by Seamus Heaney 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, His last gruel of winter seeds Caked in his stomach, Naked except for The cap, […]
The Perch by Seamus Heaney
The Perch by Seamus Heaney 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 in the river’s glorified body That is passable through, but they’re bluntly holding the pass, Under […]
The Otter by Seamus Heaney
The Otter by Seamus Heaney 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 again This year and every year since. I sat dry-throated on the warm stones. You were […]
The Harvest Bow by Seamus Heaney
The Harvest Bow by Seamus Heaney 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 of straw. Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks And lapped the spurs on […]
The Grauballe Man by Seamus Heaney
The Grauballe Man by Seamus Heaney 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 ball of his heel like a basalt egg. His instep has shrunk cold as a […]
The Early Purges by Seamus Heaney
The Early Purges by Seamus Heaney 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 soon soused. They were slung on the snout Of the pump and the water pumped […]
Testimony by Seamus Heaney
Testimony by Seamus Heaney ‘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 a view of us In our gloves and aprons coming down the hill. Two lines of them, […]
Strange Fruit by Seamus Heaney
Strange Fruit by Seamus Heaney 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 leathery beauty. Pash of tallow, perishable treasure: Her broken nose is dark as a turf clod, […]
Song by Seamus Heaney
Song by Seamus Heaney 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 immortelles of perfect pitch And that moment when the bird sings very close To the music of […]
Rite of Spring by Seamus Heaney
Rite of Spring by Seamus Heaney 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 twisting of wheat straw into ropes, lapping them tight Round stem and snout, then a […]
Requiem for the Croppies by Seamus Heaney
Requiem for the Croppies by Seamus Heaney 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 people hardly marching… on the hike… We found new tactics happening each day: We’d […]
Postscript by Seamus Heaney
Postscript by Seamus Heaney 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 the ocean on one side is wild With foam and glitter, and inland among stones The surface […]
Personal Helicon by Seamus Heaney
Personal Helicon by Seamus Heaney 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, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top. I savoured the rich crash when a bucket […]
Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication by Seamus Heaney
Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication by Seamus Heaney 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 each long afternoon. So, her hands scuffled over the bakeboard, the reddening stove […]
Mid-Term Break by Seamus Heaney
Mid-Term Break by Seamus Heaney 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 always taken funerals in his stride– And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow. […]
Lovers on Aran by Seamus Heaney
Lovers on Aran by Seamus Heaney 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 tide That yielded with an ebb, with a soft crash? Did sea define the land […]
Limbo by Seamus Heaney
Limbo by Seamus Heaney 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 tenderly Till the frozen knobs of her wrists Were dead as the gravel, He was a minnow […]
Keeping Going by Seamus Heaney
Keeping Going by Seamus Heaney 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 beneath your elbow, Your pop-eyes and big cheeks nearly bursting With laughter, but keeping the drone […]
From The Frontier Of Writing by Seamus Heaney
From The Frontier Of Writing by Seamus Heaney 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 of more on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent down cradled guns that […]
Follower by Seamus Heaney
Follower by Seamus Heaney 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 And fit the bright steel-pointed sock. The sod rolled over without breaking. At the headrig, with a […]
Exposure by Seamus Heaney
Exposure by Seamus Heaney 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 Like a glimmer of haws and rose-hips, And I sometimes see a falling star. If I could […]
Docker by Seamus Heaney
Docker by Seamus Heaney 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 on a Catholic- Oh yes, that kind of thing could start again; The only Roman collar he […]
Death Of A Naturalist by Seamus Heaney
Death Of A Naturalist by Seamus Heaney 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, bluebottles Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell. There were dragon-flies, spotted […]
Casualty by Seamus Heaney
Casualty by Seamus Heaney 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 of the eyes And a discreet dumb-show Of pulling off the top; At closing time would go […]
Bogland by Seamus Heaney
Bogland by Seamus Heaney 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 Is bog that keeps crusting Between the sights of the sun. They’ve taken the skeleton Of the […]
Blackberry-Picking by Seamus Heaney
Blackberry-Picking by Seamus Heaney 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 first one and its flesh was sweet Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it Leaving stains […]
Act of Union by Seamus Heaney
Act of Union by Seamus Heaney 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 of eastern coast And arms and legs are thrown Beyond your gradual hills. I caress […]