New and Selected Poems by Seamus Heaney Read Free Book Online

cross,
    ready to say the dream words I renounce …
       
     
    Blurred oval prints of newly ordained faces,
‘Father’ pronounced with a fawning relish,
    the sunlit tears of parents being blessed.
       
     
    I saw a young priest, glossy as a blackbird,
as if he had stepped from his anointing
    a moment ago: his purple stole and cord
       
     
    or cincture tied loosely, his polished shoes
unexpectedly secular beneath
    a pleated, lace-hemmed alb of linen cloth.
       
     
    His name had lain undisturbed for years
like an old bicycle wheel in a ditch
    ripped at last from under jungling briars,
       
     
    wet and perished. My arms were open wide
but I could not say the words. ‘The rain forest,’ he said,
    ‘you’ve never seen the like of it. I lasted
       
     
    only a couple of years. Bare-breasted
women and rat-ribbed men. Everything wasted.
    I rotted like a pear. I sweated masses …’
       
     
    His breath came short and shorter. ‘In long houses
I raised the chalice above headdresses.
In hoc signo … On that abandoned
       
     
    mission compound, my vocation
is a steam off drenched creepers.’
    I had broken off from the renunciation
       
     
    while he was speaking, to clear the way
for other pilgrims queueing to get started.
    ‘I’m older now than you when you went away,’
       
     
    I ventured, feeling a strange reversal.
‘I never could see you on the foreign missions.
    I could only see you on a bicycle,
       
     
    a clerical student home for the summer
doomed to the decent thing. Visiting neighbours.
    Drinking tea and praising home-made bread.
       
     
    Something in them would be ratified
when they saw you at the door in your black suit,
    arriving like some sort of holy mascot.
       
     
    You gave too much relief, you raised a siege
the world had laid against their kitchen grottoes
    hung with holy pictures and crucifixes.’
       
     
    ‘And you,’ he faltered, ‘what are you doing here
but the same thing? What possessed you?
    I at least was young and unaware
       
     
    that what I thought was chosen was convention.
But all this you were clear of you walked into
over again. And the god has, as they say, withdrawn.
       
     
    What are you doing, going through these motions?
Unless … Unless …’ Again he was short of breath
    and his whole fevered body yellowed and shook.
       
     
    ‘Unless you are here taking the last look.’
Then where he stood was empty as the roads
    we both grew up beside, where the sick man
       
     
    had taken his last look one drizzly evening
when the tarmac steamed with first breath of spring,
    a knee-deep mist I waded silently
       
     
    behind him, on his circuits, visiting.

V
     
    An old man’s hands, like soft paws rowing forward,
groped for and warded off the air ahead.
Barney Murphy shuffled on the concrete.
Master Murphy . I heard the weakened voice
bulling in sudden rage all over again
and fell in behind, my eyes fixed on his heels
like a man lifting swathes at a mower’s heels.
His sockless feet were like the dried broad bean
that split its stitches in the display jar
high on a window in the old classroom,
white as shy faces in the classroom door.
‘Master,’ those elders whispered, ‘I wonder, master …’,
rustling envelopes, proffering them, withdrawing,
waiting for him to sign beside their mark,
and ‘Master’ I repeated to myself
so that he stopped but did not turn or move,
gone quiet in the shoulders, his small head
vigilant in the cold gusts off the lough.
    I moved ahead and faced him, shook his hand.
       
     
    Above the winged collar, his mottled face
went distant in a smile as the voice
readied itself and husked and scraped, ‘Good man,
good man yourself,’ before it lapsed again
in the limbo and dry urn of the larynx.
The adam’s apple in its weathered sac
worked like the plunger of a pump in drought
but yielded nothing to help the helpless smile.
Morning field smells came past on the wind,
the sex-cut of