100 Poems

by Seamus Heaney

inside his burial mound,

  though dead by violence

  and unavenged.

  Men said that he was chanting

  verses about honour

  and that four lights burned

  in corners of the chamber:

  which opened then, as he turned

  with a joyful face

  to look at the moon.

  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 ball of his heel

  like a basalt egg.

  His instep has shrunk

  cold as a swan’s foot

  or a wet swamp root.

  His hips are the ridge

  and purse of a mussel,

  his spine an eel arrested

  under a glisten of mud.

  The head lifts,

  the chin is a visor

  raised above the vent

  of his slashed throat

  that has tanned and toughened.

  The cured wound

  opens inwards to a dark

  elderberry place.

  Who will say ‘corpse’

  to his vivid cast?

  Who will say ‘body’

  to his opaque repose?

  And his rusted hair,

  a mat unlikely

  as a foetus’s.

  I first saw his twisted face

  in a photograph,

  a head and shoulder

  out of the peat,

  bruised like a forceps baby,

  but now he lies

  perfected in my memory,

  down to the red horn

  of his nails,

  hung in the scales

  with beauty and atrocity:

  with the Dying Gaul

  too strictly compassed

  on his shield,

  with the actual weight

  of each hooded victim,

  slashed and dumped.

  Punishment

  I can feel the tug

  of the halter at the nape

  of her neck, the wind

  on her naked front.

  It blows her nipples

  to amber beads,

  it shakes the frail rigging

  of her ribs.

  I can see her drowned

  body in the bog,

  the weighing stone,

  the floating rods and boughs.

  Under which at first

  she was a barked sapling

  that is dug up

  oak-bone, brain-firkin:

  her shaved head

  like a stubble of black corn,

  her blindfold a soiled bandage,

  her noose a ring

  to store

  the memories of love.

  Little adulteress,

  before they punished you

  you were flaxen-haired,

  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 civilized outrage

  yet understand the exact

  and tribal, intimate revenge.

  from Whatever You Say Say Nothing

  I

  I’m writing this just after an encounter

  With an English journalist in search of ‘views

  On the Irish thing’. I’m back in winter

  Quarters where bad news is no longer news,

  Where media-men and stringers sniff and point,

  Where zoom lenses, recorders and coiled leads

  Litter the hotels. The times are out of joint

  But I incline as much to rosary beads

  As to the jottings and analyses

  Of politicians and newspapermen

  Who’ve scribbled down the long campaign from gas

  And protest to gelignite and Sten,

  Who proved upon their pulses ‘escalate’,

  ‘Backlash’ and ‘crack down’, ‘the provisional wing’,

  ‘Polarization’ and ‘long-standing hate’.

  Yet I live here, I live here too, I sing,

  Expertly civil-tongued with civil neighbours

  On the high wires of first wireless reports,

  Sucking the fake taste, the stony flavours

  Of those sanctioned, old, elaborate retorts:

  ‘Oh, it’s disgraceful, surely, I agree.’

  ‘Where’s it going to end?’ ‘It’s getting worse.’

  ‘They’re murderers.’ ‘Internment, understandably …’

  The ‘voice of sanity’ is getting hoarse.

  III

  ‘Religion’s never mentioned here,’ of course.

  ‘You know them by their eyes,’ and hold your tongue.

  ‘One side’s as bad as the other,’ never worse.

  Christ, it’s near time that some small leak was sprung

  In the great dykes the Dutchman made

  To dam the dangerous tide that followed Seamus.

  Yet for all this art and sedentary trade

  I am incapable. The famous

  Northern reticence, the tight gag of place

  And times: yes, yes. Of the ‘wee six’ I sing

  Where to be saved you only must save face

  And whatever you say, you say nothing.

  Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us:

  Manoeuvrings to find out name and school,

  Subtle discrimination by addresses

  With hardly an exception to the rule

  That Norman, Ken and Sidney signalled Prod

  And Seamus (call me Sean) was sure-fire Pape.

  O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,

  Of open minds as open as a trap,

  Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks,

  Where half of us, as in a wooden horse,

  Were cabin’d and confined like wily Greeks,

  Besieged within the siege, whispering morse.

  IV

  This morning from a dewy motorway

  I saw the new camp for the internees:

  A bomb had left a crater of fresh clay

  In the roadside, and over in the trees

  Machine-gun posts defined a real stockade.

  There was that white mist you get on a low ground

  And it was déjà-vu, some film made

  Of Stalag 17, a bad dream with no sound.

  Is there a life before death? That’s chalked up

  In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,

  Coherent miseries, a bite and sup:

  We hug our little destiny again.

  from Singing School

  1 The Ministry of Fear

  for Seamus Deane

  Well, as Kavanagh said, we have lived

  In important places. The lonely scarp

  Of St Columb’s College, where I billeted

  For six years, overlooked your Bogside.

  I gazed into new worlds: the inflamed throat

  Of Brandywell, its floodlit dogtrack,

  The throttle of the hare. In the first week

  I was so homesick I couldn’t even eat

  The biscuits left to sweeten my exile.

  I threw them over the fence one night

  In September 1951

  When the lights of houses in the Lecky Road

  Were amber in the fog. It was an act

>   Of stealth.

  Then Belfast, and then Berkeley.

  Here’s two on’s are sophisticated,

  Dabbling in verses till they have become

  A life: from bulky envelopes arriving

  In vacation time to slim volumes

  Despatched ‘with the author’s compliments’.

  Those poems in longhand, ripped from the wire spine

  Of your exercise book, bewildered me –

  Vowels and ideas bandied free

  As the seed-pods blowing off our sycamores.

  I tried to write about the sycamores

  And innovated a South Derry rhyme

  With hushed and lulled full chimes for pushed and pulled.

  Those hobnailed boots from beyond the mountain

  Were walking, by God, all over the fine

  Lawns of elocution.

  Have our accents

  Changed? ‘Catholics, in general, don’t speak

  As well as students from the Protestant schools.’

  Remember that stuff? Inferiority

  Complexes, stuff that dreams were made on.

  ‘What’s your name, Heaney?’

  ‘Heaney, Father.’

  ‘Fair

  Enough.’

  On my first day, the leather strap

  Went epileptic in the Big Study,

  Its echoes plashing over our bowed heads,

  But I still wrote home that a boarder’s life

  Was not so bad, shying as usual.

  On long vacations, then, I came to life

  In the kissing seat of an Austin 16

  Parked at a gable, the engine running,

  My fingers tight as ivy on her shoulders,

  A light left burning for her in the kitchen.

  And heading back for home, the summer’s

  Freedom dwindling night by night, the air

  All moonlight and a scent of hay, policemen

  Swung their crimson flashlamps, crowding round

  The car like black cattle, snuffing and pointing

  The muzzle of a Sten gun in my eye:

  ‘What’s your name, driver?’

  ‘Seamus …’

  Seamus?

  They once read my letters at a roadblock

  And shone their torches on your hieroglyphics,

  ‘Svelte dictions’ in a very florid hand.

  Ulster was British, but with no rights on

  The English lyric: all around us, though

  We hadn’t named it, the ministry of fear.

  2 A Constable Calls

  His bicycle stood at the window-sill,

  The rubber cowl of a mud-splasher

  Skirting the front mudguard,

  Its fat black handlegrips

  Heating in sunlight, the ‘spud’

  Of the dynamo gleaming and cocked back,

  The pedal treads hanging relieved

  Of the boot of the law.

  His cap was upside down

  On the floor, next his chair.

  The line of its pressure ran like a bevel

  In his slightly sweating hair.

  He had unstrapped

  The heavy ledger, and my father

  Was making tillage returns

  In acres, roods, and perches.

  Arithmetic and fear.

  I sat staring at the polished holster

  With its buttoned flap, the braid cord

  Looped into the revolver butt.

  ‘Any other root crops?

  Mangolds? Marrowstems? Anything like that?’

  ‘No.’ But was there not a line

  Of turnips where the seed ran out

  In the potato field? I assumed

  Small guilts and sat

  Imagining the black hole in the barracks.

  He stood up, shifted the baton-case

  Further round on his belt,

  Closed the domesday book,

  Fitted his cap back with two hands,

  And looked at me as he said goodbye.

  A shadow bobbed in the window.

  He was snapping the carrier spring

  Over the ledger. His boot pushed off

  And the bicycle ticked, ticked, ticked.

  4 Summer 1969

  While the Constabulary covered the mob

  Firing into the Falls, I was suffering

  Only the bullying sun of Madrid.

  Each afternoon, in the casserole heat

  Of the flat, as I sweated my way through

  The life of Joyce, stinks from the fishmarket

  Rose like the reek off a flax-dam.

  At night on the balcony, gules of wine,

  A sense of children in their dark corners,

  Old women in black shawls near open windows,

  The air a canyon rivering in Spanish.

  We talked our way home over starlit plains

  Where patent leather of the Guardia Civil

  Gleamed like fish-bellies in flax-poisoned waters.

  ‘Go back,’ one said, ‘try to touch the people.’

  Another conjured Lorca from his hill.

  We sat through death-counts and bullfight reports

  On the television, celebrities

  Arrived from where the real thing still happened.

  I retreated to the cool of the Prado.

  Goya’s ‘Shootings of the Third of May’

  Covered a wall – the thrown-up arms

  And spasm of the rebel, the helmeted

  And knapsacked military, the efficient

  Rake of the fusillade. In the next room,

  His nightmares, grafted to the palace wall –

  Dark cyclones, hosting, breaking; Saturn

  Jewelled in the blood of his own children,

  Gigantic Chaos turning his brute hips

  Over the world. Also, that holmgang

  Where two berserks club each other to death

  For honour’s sake, greaved in a bog, and sinking.

  He painted with his fists and elbows, flourished

  The stained cape of his heart as history charged.

  6 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

  Like a glimmer of haws and rose-hips,

  And I sometimes see a falling star.

  If I could come on meteorite!

  Instead I walk through damp leaves,

  Husks, the spent flukes of autumn,

  Imagining a hero

  On some muddy compound,

  His gift like a slingstone

  Whirled for the desperate.

  How did I end up like this?

  I often think of my friends’

  Beautiful prismatic counselling

  And the anvil brains of some who hate me

  As I sit weighing and weighing

  My responsible tristia.

  For what? For the ear? For the people?

  For what is said behind-backs?

  Rain comes down through the alders,

  Its low conducive voices

  Mutter about let-downs and erosions

  And yet each drop recalls

  The diamond absolutes.

  I am neither internee nor informer;

  An inner émigré, grown long-haired

  And thoughtful; a wood-kerne

  Escaped from the massacre,

  Taking protective colouring

  From bole and bark, feeling

  Every wind that blows;

  Who, blowing up these sparks

  For their meagre heat, have missed

  The once-in-a-lifetime portent,

  The comet’s pulsing rose.

  Oysters

  Our shells clacked on the plates.

  My tongue was a filling estuary,

  My palate hung wi
th starlight:

  As I tasted the salty Pleiades

  Orion dipped his foot into the water.

  Alive and violated,

  They lay on their beds of ice:

  Bivalves: the split bulb

  And philandering sigh of ocean.

  Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.

  We had driven to that coast

  Through flowers and limestone

  And there we were, toasting friendship,

  Laying down a perfect memory

  In the cool of thatch and crockery.

  Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow,

  The Romans hauled their oysters south to Rome:

  I saw damp panniers disgorge

  The frond-lipped, brine-stung

  Glut of privilege

  And was angry that my trust could not repose

  In the clear light, like poetry or freedom

  Leaning in from sea. I ate the day

  Deliberately, that its tang

  Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.

  A Drink of Water

  She came every morning to draw water

  Like an old bat staggering up the field:

  The pump’s whooping cough, the bucket’s clatter

  And slow diminuendo as it filled,

  Announced her. I recall

  Her grey apron, the pocked white enamel

  Of the brimming bucket, and the treble

  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