100 Poems

by Seamus Heaney

  The toad who’d overheard in the beginning

  What the dog was meant to tell. ‘Human beings,’ he said

  (And here the toad was trusted absolutely),

  ‘Human beings want death to last forever.’

  Then Chukwu saw the people’s souls in birds

  Coming towards him like black spots off the sunset

  To a place where there would be neither roosts nor trees

  Nor any way back to the house of life.

  And his mind reddened and darkened all at once

  And nothing that the dog would tell him later

  Could change that vision. Great chiefs and great loves

  In obliterated light, the toad in mud,

  The dog crying out all night behind the corpse house.

  At the Wellhead

  Your songs, when you sing them with your two eyes closed

  As you always do, are like a local road

  We’ve known every turn of in the past –

  That midge-veiled, high-hedged side-road where you stood

  Looking and listening until a car

  Would come and go and leave you lonelier

  Than you had been to begin with. So, sing on,

  Dear shut-eyed one, dear far-voiced veteran,

  Sing yourself to where the singing comes from,

  Ardent and cut off like our blind neighbour

  Who played the piano all day in her bedroom.

  Her notes came out to us like hoisted water

  Ravelling off a bucket at the wellhead

  Where next thing we’d be listening, hushed and awkward.

  *

  That blind-from-birth, sweet-voiced, withdrawn musician

  Was like a silver vein in heavy clay.

  Night water glittering in the light of day.

  But also just our neighbour, Rosie Keenan.

  She touched our cheeks. She let us touch her braille

  In books like books wallpaper patterns came in.

  Her hands were active and her eyes were full

  Of open darkness and a watery shine.

  She knew us by our voices. She’d say she ‘saw’

  Whoever or whatever. Being with her

  Was intimate and helpful, like a cure

  You didn’t notice happening. When I read

  A poem with Keenan’s well in it, she said,

  ‘I can see the sky at the bottom of it now.’

  At Banagher

  Then all of a sudden there appears to me

  The journeyman tailor who was my antecedent:

  Up on a table, cross-legged, ripping out

  A garment he must recut or resew,

  His lips tight back, a thread between his teeth,

  Keeping his counsel always, giving none,

  His eyelids steady as wrinkled horn or iron.

  Self-absenting, both migrant and ensconced;

  Admitted into kitchens, into clothes

  His touch has the power to turn to cloth again –

  All of a sudden he appears to me,

  Unopen, unmendacious, unillumined.

  *

  So more power to him on the job there, ill at ease

  Under my scrutiny in spite of years

  Of being inscrutable as he threaded needles

  Or matched the facings, linings, hems and seams.

  He holds the needle just off centre, squinting,

  And licks the thread and licks and sweeps it through,

  Then takes his time to draw both ends out even,

  Plucking them sharply twice. Then back to stitching.

  Does he ever question what it all amounts to

  Or ever will? Or care where he lays his head?

  My Lord Buddha of Banagher, the way

  Is opener for your being in it.

  Postscript

  And some time make the time to drive out west

  Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,

  In September or October, when the wind

  And the light are working off each other

  So that the ocean on one side is wild

  With foam and glitter, and inland among stones

  The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit

  By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,

  Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,

  Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads

  Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.

  Useless to think you’ll park and capture it

  More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,

  A hurry through which known and strange things pass

  As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways

  And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

  from Out of the Bag

  1

  All of us came in Doctor Kerlin’s bag.

  He’d arrive with it, disappear to the room

  And by the time he’d reappear to wash

  Those nosy, rosy, big, soft hands of his

  In the scullery basin, its lined insides

  (The colour of a spaniel’s inside lug)

  Were empty for all to see, the trap-sprung mouth

  Unsnibbed and gaping wide. Then like a hypnotist

  Unwinding us, he’d wind the instruments

  Back into their lining, tie the cloth

  Like an apron round itself,

  Darken the door and leave

  With the bag in his hand, a plump ark by the keel …

  Until the next time came and in he’d come

  In his fur-lined collar that was also spaniel-coloured

  And go stooping up to the room again, a whiff

  Of disinfectant, a Dutch interior gleam

  Of waistcoat satin and highlights on the forceps.

  Getting the water ready, that was next –

  Not plumping hot, and not lukewarm, but soft,

  Sud-luscious, saved for him from the rain-butt

  And savoured by him afterwards, all thanks

  Denied as he towelled hard and fast,

  Then held his arms out suddenly behind him

  To be squired and silk-lined into the camel coat.

  At which point he once turned his eyes upon me,

  Hyperborean, beyond-the-north-wind blue,

  Two peepholes to the locked room I saw into

  Every time his name was mentioned, skimmed

  Milk and ice, swabbed porcelain, the white

  And chill of tiles, steel hooks, chrome surgery tools

  And blood dreeps in the sawdust where it thickened

  At the foot of each cold wall. And overhead

  The little, pendent, teat-hued infant parts

  Strung neatly from a line up near the ceiling –

  A toe, a foot and shin, an arm, a cock

  A bit like the rosebud in his buttonhole.

  4

  The room I came from and the rest of us all came from

  Stays pure reality where I stand alone,

  Standing the passage of time, and she’s asleep

  In sheets put on for the doctor, wedding presents

  That showed up again and again, bridal

  And usual and useful at births and deaths.

  Me at the bedside, incubating for real,

  Peering, appearing to her as she closes

  And opens her eyes, then lapses back

  Into a faraway smile whose precinct of vision

  I would enter every time, to assist and be asked

  In that hoarsened whisper of triumph,

  ‘And what do you think

  Of the new wee baby the doctor brought for us all

  When I was asleep?’

  The Clothes Shrine

  It was a whole new sweetness

  In the early days to find

  Light white muslin blouses

  On a see-through nylon line

  Drip-drying in the bathroom

  Or a nylon slip in the shine

  Of its own elect
ricity –

  As if St Brigid once more

  Had rigged up a ray of sun

  Like the one she’d strung on air

  To dry her own cloak on

  (Hard-pressed Brigid, so

  Unstoppably on the go) –

  The damp and slump and unfair

  Drag of the workaday

  Made light of and got through

  As usual, brilliantly.

  from Sonnets from Hellas

  1 Into Arcadia

  It was opulence and amen on the mountain road.

  Walnuts bought on a high pass from a farmer

  Who’d worked in Melbourne once and now trained water

  Through a system of pipes and runnels of split reed

  Known in Hellas, probably, since Hesiod –

  That was the least of it. When we crossed the border

  From Argos into Arcadia, and farther

  Into Arcadia, a lorry-load

  Of apples had burst open on the road

  So that for yards our tyres raunched and scrunched them

  But we drove on, juiced up and fleshed and spattered,

  Revelling in it. And then it was the goatherd

  With his goats in the forecourt of the filling station,

  Subsisting beyond eclogue and translation.

  Anahorish 1944

  ‘We were killing pigs when the Americans arrived.

  A Tuesday morning, sunlight and gutter-blood

  Outside the slaughterhouse. From the main road

  They would have heard the squealing,

  Then heard it stop and had a view of us

  In our gloves and aprons coming down the hill.

  Two lines of them, guns on their shoulders, marching.

  Armoured cars and tanks and open jeeps.

  Sunburnt hands and arms. Unknown, unnamed,

  Hosting for Normandy.

  Not that we knew then

  Where they were headed, standing there like youngsters

  As they tossed us gum and tubes of coloured sweets.’

  Anything Can Happen

  after Horace, Odes, I, 34

  Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter

  Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head

  Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now

  He galloped his thunder cart and his horses

  Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth

  And the clogged underearth, the River Styx,

  The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.

  Anything can happen, the tallest towers

  Be overturned, those in high places daunted,

  Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune

  Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,

  Setting it down bleeding on the next.

  Ground gives. The heaven’s weight

  Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid.

  Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.

  Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.

  Helmet

  Bobby Breen’s. His Boston fireman’s gift

  With BREEN in scarlet letters on its spread

  Fantailing brim,

  Tinctures of sweat and hair oil

  In the withered sponge and shock-absorbing webs

  Beneath the crown –

  Or better say the crest, for crest it is –

  Leather-trimmed, steel-ridged, hand-tooled, hand-sewn,

  Tipped with a little bud of beaten copper …

  Bobby Breen’s badged helmet’s on my shelf

  These twenty years, ‘the headgear

  Of the tribe’, as O’Grady called it

  In right heroic mood that afternoon

  When the fireman-poet presented it to me

  As ‘the visiting fireman’ –

  As if I were up to it, as if I had

  Served time under it, his fire-thane’s shield,

  His shoulder-awning, while shattering glass

  And rubble-bolts out of a burning roof

  Hailed down on every hatchet man and hose man there

  Till the hard-reared shield-wall broke.

  District and Circle

  Tunes from a tin whistle underground

  Curled up a corridor I’d be walking down

  To where I knew I was always going to find

  My watcher on the tiles, cap by his side,

  His fingers perked, his two eyes eyeing me

  In an unaccusing look I’d not avoid,

  Or not just yet, since both were out to see

  For ourselves.

  As the music larked and capered

  I’d trigger and untrigger a hot coin

  Held at the ready, but now my gaze was lowered

  For was our traffic not in recognition?

  Accorded passage, I would re-pocket and nod,

  And he, still eyeing me, would also nod.

  *

  Posted, eyes front, along the dreamy ramparts

  Of escalators ascending and descending

  To a monotonous slight rocking in the works,

  We were moved along, upstanding.

  Elsewhere, underneath, an engine powered,

  Rumbled, quickened, evened, quieted.

  The white tiles gleamed. In passages that flowed

  With draughts from cooler tunnels, I missed the light

  Of all-overing, long since mysterious day,

  Parks at lunchtime where the sunners lay

  On body-heated mown grass regardless,

  A resurrection scene minutes before

  The resurrection, habitués

  Of their garden of delights, of staggered summer.

  *

  Another level down, the platform thronged.

  I re-entered the safety of numbers,

  A crowd half straggle-ravelled and half strung

  Like a human chain, the pushy newcomers

  Jostling and purling underneath the vault,

  On their marks to be first through the doors,

  Street-loud, then succumbing to herd-quiet …

  Had I betrayed or not, myself or him?

  Always new to me, always familiar,

  This unrepentant, now repentant turn

  As I stood waiting, glad of a first tremor,

  Then caught up in the now-or-never whelm

  Of one and all the full length of the train.

  *

  Stepping on to it across the gap,

  On to the carriage metal, I reached to grab

  The stubby black roof-wort and take my stand

  From planted ball of heel to heel of hand

  As sweet traction and heavy down-slump stayed me.

  I was on my way, well girded, yet on edge,

  Spot-rooted, buoyed, aloof,

  Listening to the dwindling noises off,

  My back to the unclosed door, the platform empty;

  And wished it could have lasted,

  That long between-times pause before the budge

  And glaze-over, when any forwardness

  Was unwelcome and bodies readjusted,

  Blindsided to themselves and other bodies.

  *

  So deeper into it, crowd-swept, strap-hanging,

  My lofted arm a-swivel like a flail,

  My father’s glazed face in my own waning

  And craning …

  Again the growl

  Of shutting doors, the jolt and one-off treble

  Of iron on iron, then a long centrifugal

  Haulage of speed through every dragging socket.

  And so by night and day to be transported

  Through galleried earth with them, the only relict

  Of all that I belonged to, hurtled forward,

  Reflecting in a window mirror-backed

  By blasted weeping rock-walls.

  Flicker-lit.

  Midnight Anvil

  If I wasn’t there

  When Barney Devlin hammered

  The midnigh
t anvil

  I can still hear it: twelve blows

  Struck for the millennium.

  *

  His nephew heard it

  In Edmonton, Alberta:

  The cellular phone

  Held high as a horse’s ear,

  Barney smiling to himself.

  *

  Afterwards I thought

  Church bels beyond the starres heard

  And then imagined

  Barney putting it to me:

  ‘You’ll maybe write a poem.’

  *

  What I’ll do instead

  Is quote those waterburning

  Medieval smiths:

  ‘Huf, puf! Lus, bus! Col!’ Such noise

  On nights heard no one never.

  *

  And Eoghan Rua

  Asking Séamus MacGearailt

  To forge him a spade

  Sharp, well shaped from the anvil,

  And ringing sweet as a bell.

  The Lift

  A first green braird: the hawthorn half in leaf.

  Her funeral filled the road

  And could have stepped from some old photograph

  Of a Breton pardon, remote

  Familiar women and men in caps

  Walking four abreast, soon falling quiet.

  Then came the throttle and articulated whops

  Of a helicopter crossing, and afterwards

  Awareness of the sound of our own footsteps,