100 Poems

by Seamus Heaney

Were all at prayers inside the oratory

  A ship appeared above them in the air.

  The anchor dragged along behind so deep

  It hooked itself into the altar rails

  And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

  A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope

  And struggled to release it. But in vain.

  ‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’

  The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So

  They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back

  Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

  from Crossings

  xxvii

  Everything flows. Even a solid man,

  A pillar to himself and to his trade,

  All yellow boots and stick and soft felt hat,

  Can sprout wings at the ankle and grow fleet

  As the god of fair days, stone posts, roads and crossroads,

  Guardian of travellers and psychopomp.

  ‘Look for a man with an ashplant on the boat,’

  My father told his sister setting out

  For London, ‘and stay near him all night

  And you’ll be safe.’ Flow on, flow on

  The journey of the soul with its soul guide

  And the mysteries of dealing-men with sticks!

  The Rain Stick

  for Beth and Rand

  Up-end the rain stick and what happens next

  Is a music that you never would have known

  To listen for. In a cactus stalk

  Downpour, sluice-rush, spillage and backwash

  Come flowing through. You stand there like a pipe

  Being played by water, you shake it again lightly

  And diminuendo runs through all its scales

  Like a gutter stopping trickling. And now here comes

  A sprinkle of drops out of the freshened leaves,

  Then subtle little wets off grass and daisies;

  Then glitter-drizzle, almost-breaths of air.

  Up-end the stick again. What happens next

  Is undiminished for having happened once,

  Twice, ten, a thousand times before.

  Who cares if all the music that transpires

  Is the fall of grit or dry seeds through a cactus?

  You are like a rich man entering heaven

  Through the ear of a raindrop. Listen now again.

  A Sofa in the Forties

  All of us on the sofa in a line, kneeling

  Behind each other, eldest down to youngest,

  Elbows going like pistons, for this was a train

  And between the jamb-wall and the bedroom door

  Our speed and distance were inestimable.

  First we shunted, then we whistled, then

  Somebody collected the invisible

  For tickets and very gravely punched it

  As carriage after carriage under us

  Moved faster, chooka-chook, the sofa legs

  Went giddy and the unreachable ones

  Far out on the kitchen floor began to wave.

  *

  Ghost-train? Death-gondola? The carved, curved ends,

  Black leatherette and ornate gauntness of it

  Made it seem the sofa had achieved

  Flotation. Its castors on tiptoe,

  Its braid and fluent backboard gave it airs

  Of superannuated pageantry:

  When visitors endured it, straight-backed,

  When it stood off in its own remoteness,

  When the insufficient toys appeared on it

  On Christmas mornings, it held out as itself,

  Potentially heavenbound, earthbound for sure,

  Among things that might add up or let you down.

  *

  We entered history and ignorance

  Under the wireless shelf. Yippee-i-ay,

  Sang ‘The Riders of the Range’. HERE IS THE NEWS,

  Said the absolute speaker. Between him and us

  A great gulf was fixed where pronunciation

  Reigned tyrannically. The aerial wire

  Swept from a treetop down in through a hole

  Bored in the windowframe. When it moved in wind,

  The sway of language and its furtherings

  Swept and swayed in us like nets in water

  Or the abstract, lonely curve of distant trains

  As we entered history and ignorance.

  *

  We occupied our seats with all our might,

  Fit for the uncomfortableness.

  Constancy was its own reward already.

  Out in front, on the big upholstered arm,

  Somebody craned to the side, driver or

  Fireman, wiping his dry brow with the air

  Of one who had run the gauntlet. We were

  The last thing on his mind, it seemed; we sensed

  A tunnel coming up where we’d pour through

  Like unlit carriages through fields at night,

  Our only job to sit, eyes straight ahead,

  And be transported and make engine noise.

  Keeping Going

  for Hugh

  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 going on

  Interminably, between catches of breath.

  *

  The whitewash brush. An old blanched skirted thing

  On the back of the byre door, biding its time

  Until spring airs spelled lime in a work-bucket

  And a potstick to mix it in with water.

  Those smells brought tears to the eyes, we inhaled

  A kind of greeny burning and thought of brimstone.

  But the slop of the actual job

  Of brushing walls, the watery grey

  Being lashed on in broad swatches, then drying out

  Whiter and whiter, all that worked like magic.

  Where had we come from, what was this kingdom

  We knew we’d been restored to? Our shadows

  Moved on the wall and a tar border glittered

  The full length of the house, a black divide

  Like a freshly opened, pungent, reeking trench.

  *

  Piss at the gable, the dead will congregate.

  But separately. The women after dark,

  Hunkering there a moment before bedtime,

  The only time the soul was let alone,

  The only time that face and body calmed

  In the eye of heaven.

  Buttermilk and urine,

  The pantry, the housed beasts, the listening bedroom.

  We were all together there in a foretime,

  In a knowledge that might not translate beyond

  Those wind-heaved midnights we still cannot be sure

  Happened or not. It smelled of hill-fort clay

  And cattle dung. When the thorn tree was cut down

  You broke your arm. I shared the dread

  When a strange bird perched for days on the byre roof.

  *

  That scene, with Macbeth helpless and desperate

  In his nightmare – when he meets the hags again

  And sees the apparitions in the pot –

  I felt at home with that one all right. Hearth,

  Steam and ululation, the smoky hair

  Curtaining a cheek. ‘Don’t go near bad boys

  In that college that you’re bound for. Do you hear me?

  Do you hear me speaking to you? Don’t forget!’

  And then the potstick quickening the gruel,

  The steam crown swirled, everything intimate

  And fear-swathed brightening for a moment,

  Then going dull and fa
tal and away.

  *

  Grey matter like gruel flecked with blood

  In spatters on the whitewash. A clean spot

  Where his head had been, other stains subsumed

  In the parched wall he leant his back against

  That morning like any other morning,

  Part-time reservist, toting his lunch-box.

  A car came slow down Castle Street, made the halt,

  Crossed the Diamond, slowed again and stopped

  Level with him, although it was not his lift.

  And then he saw an ordinary face

  For what it was and a gun in his own face.

  His right leg was hooked back, his sole and heel

  Against the wall, his right knee propped up steady,

  So he never moved, just pushed with all his might

  Against himself, then fell past the tarred strip,

  Feeding the gutter with his copious blood.

  *

  My dear brother, you have good stamina.

  You stay on where it happens. Your big tractor

  Pulls up at the Diamond, you wave at people,

  You shout and laugh above the revs, you keep

  Old roads open by driving on the new ones.

  You called the piper’s sporrans whitewash brushes

  And then dressed up and marched us through the kitchen,

  But you cannot make the dead walk or right wrong.

  I see you at the end of your tether sometimes,

  In the milking parlour, holding yourself up

  Between two cows until your turn goes past,

  Then coming to in the smell of dung again

  And wondering, is this all? As it was

  In the beginning, is now and shall be?

  Then rubbing your eyes and seeing our old brush

  Up on the byre door, and keeping going.

  Two Lorries

  It’s raining on black coal and warm wet ashes.

  There are tyre-marks in the yard, Agnew’s old lorry

  Has all its cribs down and Agnew the coalman

  With his Belfast accent’s sweet-talking my mother.

  Would she ever go to a film in Magherafelt?

  But it’s raining and he still has half the load

  To deliver farther on. This time the lode

  Our coal came from was silk-black, so the ashes

  Will be the silkiest white. The Magherafelt

  (Via Toomebridge) bus goes by. The half-stripped lorry

  With its emptied, folded coal-bags moves my mother:

  The tasty ways of a leather-aproned coalman!

  And films no less! The conceit of a coalman …

  She goes back in and gets out the black lead

  And emery paper, this nineteen-forties mother,

  All business round her stove, half-wiping ashes

  With a backhand from her cheek as the bolted lorry

  Gets revved and turned and heads for Magherafelt

  And the last delivery. Oh, Magherafelt!

  Oh, dream of red plush and a city coalman

  As time fastforwards and a different lorry

  Groans into shot, up Broad Street, with a payload

  That will blow the bus station to dust and ashes …

  After that happened, I’d a vision of my mother,

  A revenant on the bench where I would meet her

  In that cold-floored waiting-room in Magherafelt,

  Her shopping bags full up with shovelled ashes.

  Death walked out past her like a dust-faced coalman

  Refolding body-bags, plying his load

  Empty upon empty, in a flurry

  Of motes and engine-revs, but which lorry

  Was it now? Young Agnew’s or that other,

  Heavier, deadlier one, set to explode

  In a time beyond her time in Magherafelt …

  So tally bags and sweet-talk darkness, coalman.

  Listen to the rain spit in new ashes

  As you heft a load of dust that was Magherafelt,

  Then reappear from your lorry as my mother’s

  Dreamboat coalman filmed in silk-white ashes.

  St Kevin and the Blackbird

  And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird.

  The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside

  His cell, but the cell is narrow, so

  One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff

  As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands

  And lays in it and settles down to nest.

  Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked

  Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked

  Into the network of eternal life,

  Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand

  Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks

  Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.

  *

  And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow,

  Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?

  Self-forgetful or in agony all the time

  From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?

  Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?

  Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth

  Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?

  Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river,

  ‘To labour and not to seek reward,’ he prays,

  A prayer his body makes entirely

  For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird

  And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.

  The Gravel Walks

  River gravel. In the beginning, that.

  High summer, and the angler’s motorbike

  Deep in roadside flowers, like a fallen knight

  Whose ghost we’d lately questioned: ‘Any luck?’

  As the engines of the world prepared, green nuts

  Dangled and clustered closer to the whirlpool.

  The trees dipped down. The flints and sandstone-bits

  Worked themselves smooth and smaller in a sparkle

  Of shallow, hurrying barley-sugar water

  Where minnows schooled that we scared when we played –

  An eternity that ended once a tractor

  Dropped its link-box in the gravel bed

  And cement mixers began to come to life

  And men in dungarees, like captive shades,

  Mixed concrete, loaded, wheeled, turned, wheeled, as if

  The Pharaoh’s brickyards burned inside their heads.

  *

  Hoard and praise the verity of gravel.

  Gems for the undeluded. Milt of earth.

  Its plain, champing song against the shovel

  Soundtests and sandblasts words like ‘honest worth’.

  Beautiful in or out of the river,

  The kingdom of gravel was inside you too –

  Deep down, far back, clear water running over

  Pebbles of caramel, hailstone, mackerel-blue.

  But the actual washed stuff kept you slow and steady

  As you went stooping with your barrow full

  Into an absolution of the body,

  The shriven life tired bones and marrow feel.

  So walk on air against your better judgement

  Establishing yourself somewhere in between

  Those solid batches mixed with grey cement

  And a tune called ‘The Gravel Walks’ that conjures green.

  A Call

  ‘Hold on,’ she said, ‘I’ll just run out and get him.

  The weather here’s so good, he took the chance

  To do a bit of weeding.’

  So I saw him

  Down on his hands and knees beside the leek rig,

  Touching, inspecting, separating one

  Stalk from the other, gently pulling up

  Everything not tapered, frail and leafless,

  Pleased to feel each little weed-root break,


  But rueful also …

  Then found myself listening to

  The amplified grave ticking of hall clocks

  Where the phone lay unattended in a calm

  Of mirror glass and sunstruck pendulums …

  And found myself then thinking: if it were nowadays,

  This is how Death would summon Everyman.

  Next thing he spoke and I nearly said I loved him.

  A Dog Was Crying Tonight in Wicklow Also

  in memory of Donatus Nwoga

  When human beings found out about death

  They sent the dog to Chukwu with a message:

  They wanted to be let back to the house of life.

  They didn’t want to end up lost forever

  Like burnt wood disappearing into smoke

  Or ashes that get blown away to nothing.

  Instead, they saw their souls in a flock at twilight

  Cawing and headed back for the same old roosts

  And the same bright airs and wing-stretchings each morning.

  Death would be like a night spent in the wood:

  At first light they’d be back in the house of life.

  (The dog was meant to tell all this to Chukwu).

  But death and human beings took second place

  When he trotted off the path and started barking

  At another dog in broad daylight just barking

  Back at him from the far bank of a river.

  And that is how the toad reached Chukwu first,