New and Selected Poems

by Seamus Heaney

  Creak of her voice like the pump’s handle.

  Nights when a full moon lifted past her gable

  It fell back through her window and would lie

  Into the water set out on the table.

  Where I have dipped to drink again, to be

  Faithful to the admonishment on her cup,

  Remember the Giver, fading off the lip.

  The Strand at Lough Beg

  In memory of Colum McCartney

  All round this little island, on the strand

  Far down below there, where the breakers strive,

  Grow the tall rushes from the oozy sand.

  DANTE, Purgatorio, I, 100–103

  Leaving the white glow of filling stations

  And a few lonely streetlamps among fields

  You climbed the hills towards Newtownhamilton

  Past the Fews Forest, out beneath the stars –

  Along that road, a high, bare pilgrim’s track

  Where Sweeney fled before the bloodied heads,

  Goat-beards and dogs’ eyes in a demon pack

  Blazing out of the ground, snapping and squealing.

  What blazed ahead of you? A faked road block?

  The red lamp swung, the sudden brakes and stalling

  Engine, voices, heads hooded and the cold-nosed gun?

  Or in your driving mirror, tailing headlights

  That pulled out suddenly and flagged you down

  Where you weren’t known and far from what you knew:

  The lowland clays and waters of Lough Beg,

  Church Island’s spire, its soft treeline of yew.

  There you once heard guns fired behind the house

  Long before rising time, when duck shooters

  Haunted the marigolds and bulrushes,

  But still were scared to find spent cartridges,

  Acrid, brassy, genital, ejected,

  On your way across the strand to fetch the cows.

  For you and yours and yours and mine fought shy,

  Spoke an old language of conspirators

  And could not crack the whip or seize the day:

  Big-voiced scullions, herders, feelers round

  Haycocks and hindquarters, talkers in byres,

  Slow arbitrators of the burial ground.

  Across that strand of yours the cattle graze

  Up to their bellies in an early mist

  And now they turn their unbewildered gaze

  To where we work our way through squeaking sedge

  Drowning in dew. Like a dull blade with its edge

  Honed bright, Lough Beg half shines under the haze.

  I turn because the sweeping of your feet

  Has stopped behind me, to find you on your knees

  With blood and roadside muck in your hair and eyes,

  Then kneel in front of you in brimming grass

  And gather up cold handfuls of the dew

  To wash you, cousin. I dab you clean with moss

  Fine as the drizzle out of a low cloud.

  I lift you under the arms and lay you flat.

  With rushes that shoot green again, I plait

  Green scapulars to wear over your shroud.

  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 of the eyes

  And a discreet dumb-show

  Of pulling off the top;

  At closing time would go

  In waders and peaked cap

  Into the showery dark,

  A dole-kept breadwinner

  But a natural for work.

  I loved his whole manner,

  Sure-footed but too sly,

  His deadpan sidling tact,

  His fisherman’s quick eye

  And turned observant back.

  Incomprehensible

  To him, my other life.

  Sometimes, on his high stool,

  Too busy with his knife

  At a tobacco plug

  And not meeting my eye,

  In the pause after a slug

  He mentioned poetry.

  We would be on our own

  And, always politic

  And shy of condescension,

  I would manage by some trick

  To switch the talk to eels

  Or lore of the horse and cart

  Or the Provisionals.

  But my tentative art

  His turned back watches too:

  He was blown to bits

  Out drinking in a curfew

  Others obeyed, three nights

  After they shot dead

  The thirteen men in Derry.

  PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said,

  BOGSIDE NIL. That Wednesday

  Everybody held

  His breath and trembled.

  II

  It was a day of cold

  Raw silence, wind-blown

  Surplice and soutane:

  Rained-on, flower-laden

  Coffin after coffin

  Seemed to float from the door

  Of the packed cathedral

  Like blossoms on slow water.

  The common funeral

  Unrolled its swaddling band,

  Lapping, tightening

  Till we were braced and bound

  Like brothers in a ring.

  But he would not be held

  At home by his own crowd

  Whatever threats were phoned,

  Whatever black flags waved.

  I see him as he turned

  In that bombed offending place,

  Remorse fused with terror

  In his still knowable face,

  His cornered outfaced stare

  Blinding in the flash.

  He had gone miles away

  For he drank like a fish

  Nightly, naturally

  Swimming towards the lure

  Of warm lit-up places,

  The blurred mesh and murmur

  Drifting among glasses

  In the gregarious smoke.

  How culpable was he

  That last night when he broke

  Our tribe’s complicity?

  ‘Now you’re supposed to be

  An educated man,’

  I hear him say. ‘Puzzle me

  The right answer to that one.’

  III

  I missed his funeral,

  Those quiet walkers

  And sideways talkers

  Shoaling out of his lane

  To the respectable

  Purring of the hearse …

  They move in equal pace

  With the habitual

  Slow consolation

  Of a dawdling engine,

  The line lifted, hand

  Over fist, cold sunshine

  On the water, the land

  Banked under fog: that morning

  When he took me in his boat,

  The screw purling, turning

  Indolent fathoms white,

  I tasted freedom with him.

  To get out early, haul

  Steadily off the bottom,

  Dispraise the catch, and smile

  As you find a rhythm

  Working you, slow mile by mile,

  Into your proper haunt

  Somewhere, well out, beyond …

  Dawn-sniffing revenant,

  Plodder through midnight rain,

  Question me again.

  Badgers

  When the badger glimmered away

  into another garden

  you stood, half-lit with whiskey,

  sensing you had disturbed

  some soft returning.

  The murdered dead,

  you thought.

  But could it not have been

  some viol
ent shattered boy

  nosing out what got mislaid

  between the cradle and the explosion,

  evenings when windows stood open

  and the compost smoked down the backs?

  Visitations are taken for signs.

  At a second house I listened

  for duntings under the laurels

  and heard intimations whispered

  about being vaguely honoured.

  And to read even by carcasses

  the badgers have come back.

  One that grew notorious

  lay untouched in the roadside.

  Last night one had me braking

  but more in fear than in honour.

  Cool from the sett and redolent

  of his runs under the night,

  the bogey of fern country

  broke cover in me

  for what he is:

  pig family

  and not at all what he’s painted.

  How perilous is it to choose

  not to love the life we’re shown?

  His sturdy dirty body

  and interloping grovel.

  The intelligence in his bone.

  The unquestionable houseboy’s shoulders

  that could have been my own.

  The Singer’s House

  When they said Carrickfergus I could hear

  the frosty echo of saltminers’ picks.

  I imagined it, chambered and glinting,

  a township built of light.

  What do we say any more

  to conjure the salt of our earth?

  So much comes and is gone

  that should be crystal and kept

  and amicable weathers

  that bring up the grain of things,

  their tang of season and store,

  are all the packing we’ll get.

  So I say to myself Gweebarra

  and its music hits off the place

  like water hitting off granite.

  I see the glittering sound

  framed in your window,

  knives and forks set on oilcloth,

  and the seals’ heads, suddenly outlined,

  scanning everything.

  People here used to believe

  that drowned souls lived in the seals.

  At spring tides they might change shape.

  They loved music and swam in for a singer

  who might stand at the end of summer

  in the mouth of a whitewashed turf-shed,

  his shoulder to the jamb, his song

  a rowboat far out in evening.

  When I came here first you were always singing,

  a hint of the clip of the pick

  in your winnowing climb and attack.

  Raise it again, man. We still believe what we hear.

  The Guttural Muse

  Late summer, and at midnight

  I smelt the heat of the day:

  At my window over the hotel car park

  I breathed the muddied night airs off the lake

  And watched a young crowd leave the discothèque.

  Their voices rose up thick and comforting

  As oily bubbles the feeding tench sent up

  That evening at dusk – the slimy tench

  Once called the ‘doctor fish’ because his slime

  Was said to heal the wounds of fish that touched it.

  A girl in a white dress

  Was being courted out among the cars:

  As her voice swarmed and puddled into laughs

  I felt like some old pike all badged with sores

  Wanting to swim in touch with soft-mouthed life.

  Glanmore Sonnets

  For Ann Saddlemyer

  our heartiest welcomer

  I

  Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground.

  The mildest February for twenty years

  Is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound

  Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors.

  Our road is steaming, the turned-up acres breathe.

  Now the good life could be to cross a field

  And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe

  Of ploughs. My lea is deeply tilled.

  Old ploughsocks gorge the subsoil of each sense

  And I am quickened with a redolence

  Of farmland as a dark unblown rose.

  Wait then … Breasting the mist, in sowers’ aprons,

  My ghosts come striding into their spring stations.

  The dream grain whirls like freakish Easter snows.

  II

  Sensings, mountings from the hiding places,

  Words entering almost the sense of touch,

  Ferreting themselves out of their dark hutch –

  ‘These things are not secrets but mysteries,’

  Oisin Kelly told me years ago

  In Belfast, hankering after stone

  That connived with the chisel, as if the grain

  Remembered what the mallet tapped to know.

  Then I landed in the hedge-school of Glanmore

  And from the backs of ditches hoped to raise

  A voice caught back off slug-horn and slow chanter

  That might continue, hold, dispel, appease:

  Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground,

  Each verse returning like the plough turned round.

  III

  This evening the cuckoo and the corncrake

  (So much, too much) consorted at twilight.

  It was all crepuscular and iambic.

  Out on the field a baby rabbit

  Took his bearings, and I knew the deer

  (I’ve seen them too from the window of the house,

  Like connoisseurs, inquisitive of air)

  Were careful under larch and May-green spruce.

  I had said earlier, ‘I won’t relapse

  From this strange loneliness I’ve brought us to.

  Dorothy and William – ’ She interrupts:

  ‘You’re not going to compare us two …?’

  Outside a rustling and twig-combing breeze

  Refreshes and relents. Is cadences.

  IV

  I use to lie with an ear to the line