Opened Ground

by Seamus Heaney

  Sensings, mountings from the hiding places 1

  She came every morning to draw water 1

  She would plunge all poets in the ninth circle 1

  Shifting brilliancies. Then winter light 1

  Sky-born and royal 1

  So, he would pay his ‘debt to medicine’ 1

  So a new similitude is given us 1

  Soft corrugations in the boortree’s trunk 1

  Some day I will go to Aarhus 1

  Some people wept, and not for sorrow – joy 1

  Squarings? In the game of marbles, squarings 1

  Statues with exposed hearts and barbed-wire crowns 1

  Strange how things in the offing, once they’re sensed 1

  Take hold of the shaft of the pen 1

  That Sunday morning we had travelled far 1

  The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise 1

  The big missal splayed 1

  The bronze soldier hitches a bronze cape 1

  The clear weather of juniper 1

  The cool that came off sheets just off the line 1

  The deal table where he wrote, so small and plain 1

  The dotted line my father’s ashplant made 1

  The drumming started in the cool of the evening, as if the 1

  The 56 lb weight. A solid iron 1

  The first real grip I ever got on things 1

  The following for the record, in the light 1

  The guttersnipe and the albatross 1

  The Irish nightingale 1

  The lambeg balloons at his belly, weighs 1

  The living mother-of-pearl of a salmon 1

  The lough waters 1

  The lough will claim a victim every year 1

  The man the hare has met 1

  The piper coming from far away is you 1

  The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley 1

  The riverbed, dried-up, half-full of leaves 1

  The road ahead 1

  The royal roads were cow paths 1

  The sandmartins’ nests were loopholes of darkness 1

  The smells of ordinariness 1

  The teacher let some big boys out at two 1

  The tightness and the nilness round that space 1

  The visible sea at a distance from the shore 1

  The wintry haw is burning out of season 1

  Then all of a sudden there appears to me 1

  There they were, as if our memory hatched them 1

  There was a sunlit absence 1

  There we were in the vaulted tunnel running 1

  They both needed to talk 1

  They seem hundreds of years away. Brueghel 1

  They’re busy in a high boat 1

  Thigh-deep in sedge and marigolds 1

  Three marble holes thumbed in the concrete road 1

  Threshed corn lay piled like grit of ivory 1

  Thunderlight on the split logs: big raindrops 1

  To be carried back to the shrine some dawn 1

  Tonight, a first movement, a pulse 1

  Unless his hair was fine-combed 1

  Up, black, striped and damasked like the chasuble 1

  Up-end the rain stick and what happens next 1

  Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground 1

  Walking with you and another lady 1

  Was it wind off the dumps 1

  We climbed the Capitol by moonlight, felt 1

  We had already left him. I walked the ice 1

  We have no prairies 1

  We lived deep in a land of optative moods 1

  We look up at her 1

  We marked the pitch: four jackets for four goalposts 1

  We picked flints 1

  WELCOME HOME YE LADS OF THE EIGHTH ARMY 1

  Well, as Kavanagh said, we have lived 1

  What she remembers 1

  When all the others were away at Mass 1

  When he stands in the judgement place 1

  When human beings found out about death 1

  When I had spread it all on linen cloth 1

  When I hoked there, I would find 1

  When I landed in the republic of conscience 1

  When I lie on the ground 1

  When the badger glimmered away 1

  When the lamp glowed 1

  When they said Carrickfergus I could hear 1

  When we climbed the slopes of the cutting 1

  When you have nothing more to say, just drive 1

  When you plunged 1

  When you sat, far-eyed and cold, in the basalt throne 1

  Where does spirit live? Inside or outside 1

  Where the sally tree went pale in every breeze 1

  While the Constabulary covered the mob 1

  White bone found 1

  Why, when it was all over, did I hold on to them? 1

  Willed down, waited for, in place at last and for good 1

  Yeats said, To those who see spirits, human skin 1

  You never saw it used but still can hear 1

  You were the one for skylights. I opposed 1

  You would hoist an old hat on the tines of a fork 1

  Your songs, when you sing them with your two eyes closed 1

  About the Author

  Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland. Death of a Naturalist, his first collection of poems, appeared in 1966 and since then he has published poetry, criticism and translations – including Beowulf (1999) – which have established him as one of the leading poets now at work. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. District and Circle (2006) was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2006. Stepping Stones, a book of interviews conducted by Dennis O’Driscoll, appeared in 2008. In 2009 he received the David Cohen Prize for Literature.

  Copyright

  This ebook edition published in 2010

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  All rights reserved

  © Seamus Heaney, 1998

  ‘Crediting Poetry’ © The Nobel Foundation, 1995

  The right of Seamus Heaney to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–26279–3