New and Selected Poems by Seamus Heaney Read Free Book Online Page A

sweetbriar after rain,
new-mown meadow hay, bird’s nests filled with leaves.
       
     
    ‘You’d have thought that Anahorish School
was purgatory enough for any man,’
I said. ‘You have done your station.’
Then a little trembling happened and his breath
rushed the air softly as scythes in his lost meadows.
‘Birch trees have overgrown Leitrim Moss,
dairy herds are grazing where the school was
and the school garden’s loose black mould is grass.’
He was gone with that and I was faced wrong way
into more pilgrims absorbed in this exercise.
As I stood among their whispers and bare feet
the mists of all the mornings I set out
for Latin classes with him, face to face,
refreshed me. Mensa, mensa, mensam
    sang on the air like a busy sharping-stone.
       
     
    ‘We’ll go some day to my uncle’s farm at Toome – ’
Another master spoke. ‘ For what is the great
moving power and spring of verse? Feeling, and
in particular, love . When I went last year
I drank three cups of water from the well.
It was very cold. It stung me in the ears.
You should have met him – ’ Coming in as usual
with the rubbed quotation and his cocked bird’s eye
dabbing for detail. When you’re on the road
give lifts to people, you’ll always learn something .
There he went, in his belted gaberdine,
and after him, a third fosterer,
slack-shouldered and clear-eyed: ‘Sure I might have known
once I had made the pad, you’d be after me
sooner or later. Forty-two years on

and you’ve got no farther! But after that again,
where else would you go? Iceland, maybe? Maybe the Dordogne?’
And then the parting shot. ‘In my own day
the odd one came here on the hunt for women.’

VI
     
    Freckle-face, fox-head, pod of the broom,
Catkin-pixie, little fern-swish:
Where did she arrive from?
Like a wish wished
And gone, her I chose at ‘secrets’
And whispered to. When we were playing houses.
I was sunstruck at the basilica door –
A stillness far away, a space, a dish,
A blackened tin and knocked over stool –
Like a tramped neolithic floor
Uncovered among dunes where the bent grass
Whispers on like reeds about Midas’s
Secrets, secrets . I shut my ears to the bell.
    Head hugged. Eyes shut. Leaf ears. Don’t tell. Don’t tell .
       
     
    A stream of pilgrims answering the bell
Trailed up the steps as I went down them
Towards the bottle-green, still
Shade of an oak. Shades of the Sabine farm
On the beds of Saint Patrick’s Purgatory.
Late summer, country distance, not an air:
Loosen the toga for wine and poetry
Till Phoebus returning routs the morning star .
As a somnolent hymn to Mary rose
I felt an old pang that bags of grain
And the sloped shafts of forks and hoes
Once mocked me with, at my own long virgin
Fasts and thirsts, my nightly shadow feasts,
Haunting the granaries of words like breasts .
       
     
    As if I knelt for years at a keyhole
Mad for it, and all that ever opened
Was the breathed-on grille of a confessional
Until that night I saw her honey-skinned
Shoulder-blades and the wheatlands of her back
Through the wide keyhole of her keyhole dress
And a window facing the deep south of luck
Opened and I inhaled the land of kindness.
As little flowers that were all bowed and shut
By the night chills rise on their stems and open
As soon as they have felt the touch of sunlight ,
So I revived in my own wilting powers
And my heart flushed, like somebody set free .
Translated, given, under the oak tree.

VII
     
    I had come to the edge of the water,
soothed by just looking, idling over it
    as if it were a clear barometer
       
     
    or a mirror, when his reflection
did not appear but I sensed a presence
    entering into my concentration
       
     
    on not being concentrated as he spoke
my name. And though I was reluctant
    I turned to meet his face and the shock
       
     
    is still in me at what I saw. His brow
was blown open above the eye and blood
    had dried on his neck and cheek. ‘Easy now,’
       
     
    he said,