Free Opened Ground by Seamus Heaney Page A

                but wild scuttles in the wood.
                             Heavenly saints! O Holy God!
                             No skilled musicians’ cunning,
                             no soft discoursing women,
                             no open-handed giving;
                             my doom to be a long dying.
                             Our sorrows were multiplied
                             that Tuesday when Congal fell.
                             Our dead made a great harvest,
                             our remnant, a last swathe.
                             This has been my plight.
                             Suddenly cast out,
                             grieving and astray,
                             a year until last night.
    Sweeney kept going until he reached the church at Swim-Two-Birds on the Shannon, which is now called Cloon-burren; he arrived there on a Friday, to be exact. The clerics of the church were singing nones, women were beating flax and one was giving birth to a child.
    – It is unseemly, said Sweeney, for the women to violate the Lord’s fast day. That woman beating the flax reminds me of our beating at Moira.
    Then he heard the vesper bell ringing and said:
    – It would be sweeter to listen to the notes of the cuckoos on the banks of the Bann than to the whinge of this bell tonight.
    Then he uttered the poem:
       
                             I perched for rest and imagined
                             cuckoos calling across water,
                             the Bann cuckoo, calling sweeter
                             than church bells that whinge and grind.
                             Friday is the wrong day, woman,
                             for you to give birth to a son,
                             the day when Mad Sweeney fasts
                             for love of God, in penitence.

                             Do not just discount me. Listen.
                             At Moira my tribe was beaten,
                             beetled, heckled, hammered down,
                             like flax being scutched by these women.
                             From the cliff of Lough Diolar
                             up to Derry Colmcille
                             I saw the great swans, heard their calls
                             sweetly rebuking wars and battles.
                             From lonely cliff-tops, the stag
                             bells and makes the whole glen shake
                             and re-echo. I am ravished.
                             Unearthly sweetness shakes my breast.
                             O Christ, the loving and the sinless,
                             hear my prayer, attend, O Christ,
                             and let nothing separate us.
                             Blend me forever in your sweetness.
    It was the end of the harvest season and Sweeney heard a hunting-call from a company in the skirts of the wood.
    – This will be the outcry of the Ui Faolain coming to kill me, he said. I slew their king at Moira and this host is out to avenge him.
    He heard the stag bellowing and he made a poem in which he praised aloud all the trees of Ireland, and rehearsed some of his own