New Selected Poems (1988-2013)

by Seamus Heaney

  And how what’s come upon is manifest

  Only in light of what has been gone through.

  Seventh heaven may be

  The whole truth of a sixth sense come to pass.

  At any rate, when light breaks over me

  The way it did on the road beyond Coleraine

  Where wind got saltier, the sky more hurried

  And silver lamé shivered on the Bann

  Out in mid-channel between the painted poles,

  That day I’ll be in step with what escaped me.

  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.

  Mint

  It looked like a clump of small dusty nettles

  Growing wild at the gable of the house

  Beyond where we dumped our refuse and old bottles:

  Unverdant ever, almost beneath notice.

  But, to be fair, it also spelled promise

  And newness in the back yard of our life

  As if something callow yet tenacious

  Sauntered in green alleys and grew rife.

  The snip of scissor blades, the light of Sunday

  Mornings when the mint was cut and loved:

  My last things will be first things slipping from me.

  Yet let all things go free that have survived.

  Let the smells of mint go heady and defenceless

  Like inmates liberated in that yard.

  Like the disregarded ones we turned against

  Because we’d failed them by our disregard.

  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 fatal 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.

  Damson

  Gules and cement dust. A matte tacky blood

  On the bricklayer’s knuckles, like the damson stain

  That seeped through his packed lunch.

  A full hod stood

  Against the mortared wall, his big bright trowel

  In his left hand (for once) was pointing down

  As he marvelled at his right, held high and raw:

  King of the castle, scaffold-stepper, shown

  Bleeding to the world.

  Wound that I saw

  In glutinous colour fifty years ago –

  Damson as omen, weird, a dream to read –

  Is weeping with the held-at-arm’s-length dead

  From everywhere and nowhere, here and now.

  *

  Over and over, the slur, the scrape and mix

  As he trowelled and retrowelled and laid down

  Courses of glum mortar. Then the bricks

  Jiggled and settled, tocked and tapped in line.

  I loved especially the trowel’s shine,

  Its edge and apex always coming clean

  And brightening itself by mucking in.

  It looked light but felt heavy as a weapon,

  Yet when he lifted it there was no strain.

  It was all point and skim and float and glisten

  Until he washed and lapped it tight in sacking

  Like a cult blade that had to be kept hidden.

  *

  Ghosts with their tongues out for a lick of blood

  Are crowding up the ladder, all unhealed,

  And some of them still rigged in bloody gear.

  Drive them back to the doorstep or the road

  Where they lay in their own blood once, in the hot

  Nausea and last gasp of dear life.

  Trowel-wielder, woundie, drive them off

  Like Odysseus in Hades lashing out

  With his sword that dug the trench and cut the throat

  Of the sacrificial lamb.

  But not like him –

  Builder, not sacker, your shield the mortar board –

  Drive them back to the wine-dark taste of home,

  The smell of damsons simmering in a pot,

  Jam ladled thick and steaming down the sunlight.

  Weighing In

  The 56 lb weight. A solid iron

  Unit of negation. Stamped and cast

  With an inset, rung-thick, moulded, short crossbar

  For a handle. Squared-off and harmless-looking

  Until you tried to lift it, then a socket-ripping,

  Life-belittling force –

  Gravity’s black box, the immovable

  Stamp and squat and square-root of dead weight.

  Yet balance it

  Against another one placed on a weighbridge –

  On a well-adjusted, freshly greased weighbridge –

  And everything trembled, flowed with give and take.

  *

  And this is all the good tidings amount to:

  This principle of bearing, bearing up

  And bearing out, just having to

  Balance the intolerable in others

  Against our own, having to abide

  Whatever we settled for and settled into

  Against our better judgement. Passive

  Suffering makes the world go round.

  Peace on earth, men of good will, all that

  Holds good only as long as the balance holds,

  The scales ride steady and the angels’ strain

  Prolongs itself at an unearthly pitch.

  *

  To refuse the other cheek. To cast the stone.

  Not to do so some time, not to break with
<
br />   The obedient one you hurt yourself into

  Is to fail the hurt, the self, the ingrown rule.

  Prophesy who struck thee! When soldiers mocked

  Blindfolded Jesus and he didn’t strike back

  They were neither shamed nor edified, although

  Something was made manifest – the power

  Of power not exercised, of hope inferred

  By the powerless forever. Still, for Jesus’ sake,

  Do me a favour, would you, just this once?

  Prophesy, give scandal, cast the stone.

  *

  Two sides to every question, yes, yes, yes …

  But every now and then, just weighing in

  Is what it must come down to, and without

  Any self-exculpation or self-pity.

  Alas, one night when follow-through was called for

  And a quick hit would have fairly rankled,

  You countered that it was my narrowness

  That kept me keen, so got a first submission.

  I held back when I should have drawn blood

  And that way (mea culpa) lost an edge.

  A deep mistaken chivalry, old friend.

  At this stage only foul play cleans the slate.

  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.