Human Chain

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Human Chain Page 4

by Seamus Heaney


  Less durable if more desired,

  The mealy textured wallpaper:

  Its brede of bosomed roses pressed

  And flattened under smoothing irons.

  Brown parcel paper, if need be.

  Newsprint, even. Anything

  To make a covert for the newness,

  Learn you were a keeper only.

  II

  Open, settle, smell, begin.

  A spelling out, a finger trace:

  One with Fursa, Colmcille,

  The riddle-solving anchorites –

  Macóige of Lismore, for instance,

  Who, when asked which attribute

  Of character was best, replied

  ‘Steadiness, for it is best

  When a man has set his hand to tasks

  To persevere. I have never heard

  Fault found with that.’ Tongue-tried words

  Finger-traced, retraced, lip-read.

  III

  Bread and pencils. Musty satchel.

  The age of lessons to be learnt.

  Reader, ours were ‘reading books’

  And we were ‘scholars’, our good luck

  To get such schooling in the first place

  For all its second and third handings.

  The herdsman by the roadside told you.

  The sibyls of the chimney corner.

  The age of wonders too, such as:

  Rubbings out with balls of bread-pith,

  Birds and butterflies in ‘transfers’

  Like stamps from Eden on a flyleaf.

  IV

  The master’s store an otherwhere:

  Penshafts sheathed in black tin – was it? –

  A metal wrap, at any rate,

  A tight nib-holding cuticle –

  And nibs in packets by the gross,

  Powdered ink, bunched cedar pencils,

  Jotters, exercise books, rulers

  Stacked like grave goods on the shelves.

  The privilege of being sent

  To fetch a box of pristine chalk

  Or perfect copperplate examples

  Of headline script for copying out.

  V

  ‘There are three right ways to spell tu.

  Can you tell me how you write that down?’

  The herdsman asks. And when we can’t,

  ‘Ask the master if he can.’

  Neque, Caesar says, fas esse

  existimant ea litteris

  mandare. ‘Nor do they think it right

  To commit the things they know to writing.’

  Not, that is, until there comes

  The psalm book called in Irish cathach,

  Meaning ‘battler’, meaning victory

  When borne three times round an army.

  VI

  Sparks the Ulster warriors struck

  Off wielded swords made Bricriu’s hall

  Blaze like the sun, according to

  The Dun Cow scribe; and then Cuchulain

  Entertained the embroidery women

  By flinging needles in the air

  So as they fell the point of one

  Partnered with the eye of the next

  To form a glittering reeling chain –

  As in my dream a gross of nibs

  Spills off the shelf, airlifts and links

  Into a giddy gilt corona.

  VII

  A vision of the school the school

  Won’t understand, nor I, not quite:

  My hand in the cold of a running stream

  Suspended, a glass beaker dipped

  And filling in the flow. I’m sent,

  The privileged one, for water

  To turn ink powder into ink –

  Out in the open, the land and sky

  And playground silent, a singing class

  I’ve been excused from going on,

  Coming out through opened windows,

  Yet still and all a world away.

  VIII

  ‘Inkwell’ now as robbed of sense

  As ‘inkhorn’: a dun cow’s, perhaps,

  Stuck upside down at dipping distance

  In the floor of the cell. Hence Colmcille’s

  Extempore when a loudmouth lands

  Breaking the Iona silence:

  This harbour shouter, it roughly goes,

  Staff in hand, he will come along

  Inclined to kiss the kiss of peace,

  He will blunder in,

  His toe will catch and overturn

  My little inkhorn, spill my ink.

  IX

  A great one has put faith in ‘meaning’

  That runs through space like a word

  Screaming and protesting, another in

  ‘Poet’s imaginings

  And memories of love’:

  Mine for now I put

  In steady-handedness maintained

  In books against its vanishing.

  Books of Lismore. Kells. Armagh.

  Of Lecan, its great Yellow Book.

  ‘The battler’, berry-browned, enshrined.

  The cured hides. The much tried pens.

  ‘Lick the Pencil’

  I

  ‘Lick the pencil’ we might have called him

  So quick he was to wet the lead, so deft

  His hand-to-mouth and tongue-flirt round the stub.

  Or ‘Drench the cow’, so fierce his nostril-grab

  And peel-back of her lip, so accurately forced

  The bottle-neck between her big bare teeth.

  Or ‘Catch the horse’, for in spite of the low-set

  Cut of him, he could always slip an arm

  Around the neck and fit winkers on

  In a single move. But as much for the surprise

  As for the truth of it, ‘Lick the pencil’

  Is what it’s going to be.

  II

  A ‘copying pencil’, so called who knows why,

  That inked itself and purpled when you licked,

  About as short

  As the cigarette butts in his pocket

  And every bit as tangy, in constant need

  Of sharpening, then of testing

  On the back of his left hand, the line as bright

  As bloodlines holly leaves might score

  On the back of a bird-nester’s,

  Indelible as the glum grey pocks

  White dandelion milk

  Would mark your skin with as it dried.

  III

  In memory of him, behold those pigmentations

  Moisten and magnify to resemble marks

  On Colmcille’s monk’s habit

  The day he died, the day he didn’t need

  To catch the horse since the horse had come to him

  Where he sat beside a path

  Because, as the Vita says, ‘he was weary’.

  And the horse ‘wept on his breast

  So the saint’s clothes were made wet.’

  Then ‘Let him, Diarmait, be,’ said Colmcille

  To his attendant, ‘till he has sorrowed for me

  And cried his fill.’

  ‘The door was open and the house was dark’

  in memory of David Hammond

  The door was open and the house was dark

  Wherefore I called his name, although I knew

  The answer this time would be silence

  That kept me standing listening while it grew

  Backwards and down and out into the street

  Where as I’d entered (I remember now)

  The streetlamps too were out.

  I felt, for the first time there and then, a stranger,

  Intruder almost, wanting to take flight

  Yet well aware that here there was no danger,

  Only withdrawal, a not unwelcoming

  Emptiness, as in a midnight hangar

  On an overgrown airfield in late summer.

  In the Attic

  I

  Like Jim Hawkins aloft in t
he cross-trees

  Of Hispaniola, nothing underneath him

  But still green water and clean bottom sand,

  The ship aground, the canted mast far out

  Above a sea-floor where striped fish pass in shoals –

  And when they’ve passed, the face of Israel Hands

  That rose in the shrouds before Jim shot him dead

  Appears to rise again … ‘But he was dead enough,’

  The story says, ‘being both shot and drowned.’

  II

  A birch tree planted twenty years ago

  Comes between the Irish Sea and me

  At the attic skylight, a man marooned

  In his own loft, a boy

  Shipshaped in the crow’s nest of a life,

  Airbrushed to and fro, wind-drunk, braced

  By all that’s thrumming up from keel to masthead,

  Rubbing his eyes to believe them and this most

  Buoyant, billowy, topgallant birch.

  III

  Ghost-footing what was then the terra firma

  Of hallway linoleum, grandfather now appears,

  His voice a-waver like the draught-prone screen

  They’d set up in the Club Rooms earlier

  For the matinee I’ve just come back from.

  ‘And Isaac Hands,’ he asks, ‘Was Isaac in it?’

  His memory of the name a-waver too,

  His mistake perpetual, once and for all,

  Like the single splash when Israel’s body fell.

  IV

  As I age and blank on names,

  As my uncertainty on stairs

  Is more and more the lightheadedness

  Of a cabin boy’s first time on the rigging,

  As the memorable bottoms out

  Into the irretrievable,

  It’s not that I can’t imagine still

  That slight untoward rupture and world-tilt

  As a wind freshened and the anchor weighed.

  A Kite for Aibhín

  after ‘L’Aquilone’ by Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912)

  Air from another life and time and place,

  Pale blue heavenly air is supporting

  A white wing beating high against the breeze,

  And yes, it is a kite! As when one afternoon

  All of us there trooped out

  Among the briar hedges and stripped thorn,

  I take my stand again, halt opposite

  Anahorish Hill to scan the blue,

  Back in that field to launch our long-tailed comet.

  And now it hovers, tugs, veers, dives askew,

  Lifts itself, goes with the wind until

  It rises to loud cheers from us below.

  Rises, and my hand is like a spindle

  Unspooling, the kite a thin-stemmed flower

  Climbing and carrying, carrying farther, higher

  The longing in the breast and planted feet

  And gazing face and heart of the kite flier

  Until string breaks and – separate, elate –

  The kite takes off, itself alone, a windfall.

  About the Author

  Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland. Death of a Naturalist, his first collection of poems, appeared in 1966, and since then he has published poetry, criticism and translations – including Beowulf (1999) – which have established him as one of the leading poets now at work. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. District and Circle was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2006. Stepping Stones, a book of interviews conducted by Dennis O’Driscoll, appeared in 2008. In 2009 he received the David Cohen Prize for Literature.

  By the Same Author

  poetry

  DEATH OF A NATURALIST

  DOOR INTO THE DARK

  WINTERING OUT

  NORTH

  FIELD WORK

  STATION ISLAND

  SWEENEY ASTRAY

  SWEENEY’S FLIGHT

  (with photographs by Rachel Giese)

  THE HAW LANTERN

  NEW SELECTED POEMS 1966–1987

  SEEING THINGS

  LAMENTS BY JAN KOCHANOWSKI

  (translated with Stanislaw Baránczak)

  OPENED GROUND: POEMS 1966–1996

  THE SPIRIT LEVEL

  BEOWULF

  ELECTRIC LIGHT

  DISTRICT AND CIRCLE

  THE TESTAMENT OF CRESSEID & SEVEN FABLES

  THE RATTLE BAG

  (edited with Ted Hughes)

  THE SCHOOL BAG

  (edited with Ted Hughes)

  prose

  PREOCCUPATIONS: SELECTED PROSE 1968–78

  THE GOVERNMENT OF THE TONGUE

  THE REDRESS OF POETRY: OXFORD LECTURES

  FINDERS KEEPERS: SELECTED PROSE 1971–2001

  STEPPING STONES

  (with Dennis O’Driscoll)

  plays

  THE CURE AT TROY

  THE BURIAL AT THEBES

  Copyright

  First published in 2010

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2012

  All rights reserved

  © Seamus Heaney, 2010

  The right of Seamus Heaney to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–26963–1

 

 

 


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