undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,
I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur
of your brain’s exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles’ webbing
and all your numbered bones:
I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,
who would connive
in civilised outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.
SEAMUS HEANEY
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 of straw.
Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks
And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of gamecocks
Harked to their gift and worked with fine intent
Until your fingers moved somnambulant:
I tell and finger it like braille,
Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable,
And if I spy into its golden loops
I see us walk between the railway slopes
Into an evening of long grass and midges,
Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges,
An auction notice on an outhouse wall –
You with a harvest bow in your lapel,
Me with the fishing rod, already homesick
For the big lift of these evenings, as your stick
Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes
Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes
Nothing: that original townland
Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand.
The end of art is peace
Could be the motto of this frail device
That I have pinned up on our deal dresser –
Like a drawn snare
Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn
Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm.
SEAMUS HEANEY
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 discotheque.
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY
A Keen for the Coins
O henny penny! Oh horsed half-crown!
O florin salmon! O sixpence hound!
O woodcock! Piglets! Hare and bull!
O mint of field and flood, farewell!
Be Ireland’s lost ark, gone to ground,
And where the rainbow ends, be found.
SEAMUS HEANEY
The Blackbird of Glanmore
On the grass when I arrive,
Filling the stillness with life,
But ready to scare off
At the very first wrong move.
In the ivy when I leave.
It’s you, blackbird, I love.
I park, pause, take heed.
Breathe. Just breathe and sit
And lines I once translated
Come back: ‘I want away
To the house of death, to my father
Under the low clay roof.’
And I think of one gone to him,
A little stillness dancer –
Haunter-son, lost brother –
Cavorting through the yard,
So glad to see me home,
My homesick first term over.
And think of a neighbour’s words
Long after the accident:
‘Yon bird on the shed roof,
Up on the ridge for weeks –
I said nothing at the time
Bur I never liked yon bird.’
The automatic lock
Clunks shut, the blackbird’s panic
Is shortlived, for a second
I’ve a bird’s eye view of myself,
A shadow on raked gravel
In front of my house of life.
Hedge-hop, I am absolute
For you, your ready talkback,
Your each stand-offish comeback,
Your picky, nervy goldbeak –
On the grass when I arrive,
In the ivy when I leave.
SEAMUS HEANEY
Englan Voice
I prepare – an prepare well – fe Englan.
Me decide, and done leave behine
all the voice of ol slave-estate bushman.
None of that distric bad-talk in Englan,
that bush talk of ol slave-estate man.
Hear me speak in Englan, an see
you dohn think I a Englan native.
Me nah go say
‘Bwoy, how you du?’
me a-go say ‘How are you old man?’
Me nah go say
‘Wha yu nyam las night?’
me a-go say ‘What did you have for supper?’
Patois talk is bushman talk –
people who talk patois them dam lazy.
Because mi bush voice so settle in me
an might let me down in-a Englan
me a-practise.
Me a-practise talk like teacher
till mi Englan voice come out-a me
like water from hillside rock.
Even if you fellows here
dohn hear mi Englan voice
I have it – an hear it in mi head!
JAMES BERRY
The Nation
The national day
had dawned. Everywhere
the national tree was opening its blossoms
to the sun’s first rays, and from all quarters
young and old in national costume
were making their way to the original National
Building, where the national standard already
fluttered against the sky. Some breakfasted
on the national dish as they walked, frequently
pausing to greet acquaintances with a heartfelt
exchange of the national gesture. Many
were leading the national animal; others carried it
in their arms. The national bird
flew overhead; and on every side
could be heard the keen strains
of the national anthem, played on
the national instrument.
Where enough were gathered together,
national feeling ran high, and concerted cries of
‘Death to the national foe!’ were raised.
The national weapon was brandished. Though
festivities were constrained by the size of
the national debt, the national sport was
vigorously played all day
and the national drink drunk.
And from midday till late in the evening
there arose continually from the rear
of the national prison the sounds of the national
method of execution, dealing out rapid
justice to those who had given way
– on this day of all days –
to th
e national vice.
ROY FISHER
Handbag
My mother’s old leather handbag,
crowded with letters she carried
all through the war. The smell
of my mother’s handbag: mints
and lipstick and Coty powder.
The look of those letters, softened
and worn at the edges, opened,
read, and refolded so often.
Letters from my father. Odour
of leather and powder, which ever
since then has meant womanliness,
and love, and anguish, and war.
RUTH FAINLIGHT
Willow Song
I went down to the railway
But the railway wasn’t there.
A long scar lay across the waste
Bound up with vetch and maidenhair
And birdsfoot trefoils everywhere.
But the clover and the sweet hay,
The cranesbill and the yarrow
Were as nothing to the rose bay
the rose bay, the rose bay,
As nothing to the rose bay willow.
I went down to the river
But the river wasn’t there.
A hill of slag lay in its course
With pennycress and cocklebur
And thistles bristling with fur.
But ragweed, dock and bitter may
And hawkbit in the hollow
Were as nothing to the rose bay,
the rose bay, the rose bay
As nothing to the rose bay willow.
I went down to find my love.
My sweet love wasn’t there.
A shadow stole into her place
And spoiled the loosestrife of her hair
And counselled me to pick despair.
Old elder and young honesty
Turned ashen, but their sorrow
Was as nothing to the rose bay
the rose bay, the rose bay,
As nothing to the rose bay willow.
O I remember summer
When the hemlock was in leaf.
The sudden poppies by the path
Were little pools of crimson grief.
Sick henbane cowered like a thief.
But self-heal sprang up in her way,
And mignonette’s light yellow,
To flourish with the rose bay,
the rose bay, the rose bay,
To flourish with the rose bay willow.
Its flames took all the wasteland
And all the river’s silt,
But as my dear grew thin and grey
They turned as white as salt or milk.
Great purples withered out of guilt,
And bright weeds blew away
In cloudy wreaths of summer snow.
And the first one was the rose bay,
the rose bay, the rose bay,
The first one was the rose bay willow.
ANNE STEVENSON
Immigrant
November ’63: eight months in London.
I pause on the low bridge to watch the pelicans:
they float swanlike, arching their white necks
over only slightly ruffled bundles of wings,
burying awkward beaks in the lake’s water.
I clench cold fists in my Marks and Spencer’s jacket
and secretly test my accent once again:
St James’s Park; St James’s Park; St James’s Park.
FLEUR ADCOCK
Begin
Begin again to the summoning birds
to the sight of light at the window,
begin to the roar of morning traffic
all along Pembroke Road.
Every beginning is a promise
born in light and dying in dark
determination and exaltation of springtime
flowering the way to work.
Begin to the pageant of queuing girls
the arrogant loneliness of swans in the canal
bridges linking the past and future
old friends passing though with us still.
Begin to the loneliness that cannot end
since it perhaps is what makes us begin,
begin to wonder at unknown faces
at crying birds in the sudden rain
at branches stark in the willing sunlight
at seagulls foraging for bread
at couples sharing a sunny secret
alone together while making good.
Though we live in a world that dreams of ending
that always seems about to give in
something that will not acknowledge conclusion
insists that we forever begin.
BRENDAN KENNELLY
River & Fountain
I
I am walking backwards into the future like a Greek.
I have nothing to say. There is nothing I would describe.
It was always thus: as if snow has fallen on Front
Square, and, feeling the downy silence of the snowflakes
That cover cobbles and each other, white erasing white,
I read shadow and snow-drift under the Campanile.
II
‘It fits on to the back of a postage stamp,’ Robert said
As he scribbled out in tiny symbols the equation,
His silhouette a frost-flower on the window of my last
Year, his page the sky between chimney-stacks, his head
And my head at the city’s centre aching for giddy
Limits, mathematics, poetry, squeaky nibs at all hours.
III
Top of the staircase, Number Sixteen in Botany Bay,
Slum-dwellers, we survived gas-rings that popped, slop-
Buckets in the bedrooms, changeable ‘wives’, and toasted
Doughy doorsteps, Freshmen turning into Sophisters
In front of the higgledy flames: our still-life, crusts
And buttery books, the half-empty marmalade jar.
IV
My Dansette record player bottled up like genies
Sibelius, Shostakovich, Bruckner, dusty sleeves
Accumulating next to Liddell and Scott’s Greek–English
Lexicon voices the fluffy needle set almost free.
I was the culture vulture from Ulster, Vincent’s joke
Who heard The Rite of Spring and contemplated suicide.
V
Adam was first to read the maroon-covered notebooks
I filled with innocent outpourings, Adam the scholar
Whose stammer could stop him christening this and that,
Whose Eden was annotation and vocabulary lists
In a precise classicist’s hand, the love of words as words.
My first and best review was Adam’s ‘I like these – I – I –’
VI
‘College poet? Village idiot you mean!’ (Vincent again).
In neither profession could I settle comfortably
Once Derek arrived reciting Rimbaud, giving names
To the constellations over the Examination Hall.
‘Are you Longley? Can I borrow your typewriter? Soon?’
His was the first snow party I attended. I felt the cold.
VII
We were from the North, hitch-hikers on the Newry Road,
Faces that vanished from a hundred driving-mirrors
Down that warren of reflections – O’Neill’s Bar, Nesbitt’s –
And through Front Gate to Connemara and Inishere,
The raw experience of market towns and clachans, then
Back to Rooms, village of minds, poetry’s townland.
VIII
Though College Square in Belfast and the Linen Hall
Had been our patch, nobody mentioned William Drennan.
In Dublin what dreams of liberty, the Index, the Ban:
Etonians on Commons cut our accents with a knife.
When Brendan from Ballylongford defied the Bishop, we
IX
A bath-house lotus-eater – fags, sodden Irish Times –
I tagged along with the Fabians, to embarrass Church
And State our grand design. Would-be class-warriors
We raised, for a moment, the Red Flag at the Rubrics,
Then joined the Civil Service and talked of Civil Rights
Was Trinity a Trojan Horse? Were we Greeks at all?
X
‘The Golden Mean is a tension, Ladies, Gentlemen,
And not a dead level’: the Homeric head of Stanford
Who would nearly sing the first lines of the Odyssey.
That year I should have failed, but, teaching the Poetics,
He asked us for definitions, and accepted mine:
‘Sir, if prose is a river, then poetry’s a fountain.’
XI
Someone has skipped the seminar. Imagine his face,
The children’s faces, my wife’s: she sat beside me then
And they were waiting to be born, ghosts from a future
Without Tom: he fell in love just once and died of it.
Oh, to have turned away from everything to one face,
Eros and Thanatos your gods, icicle and dew.
XII
Walking forwards into the past with more of an idea
The Map and the Clock Page 38
