Free New and Selected Poems by Seamus Heaney

drove a team of quills on his white field.
Round his cell door the blackbirds dart and dab.
    Then self-denial, fasting, the pure cold.
       
     
    By rules that hardened the farther they reached north
He bends to his desk and begins again.
Christ’s sickle has been in the undergrowth.
The script grows bare and Merovingian.

III
     
    The globe has spun. He stands in a wooden O.
He alludes to Shakespeare. He alludes to Graves.
Time has bulldozed the school and school window.
Balers drop bales like printouts where stooked sheaves
       
     
    Made lambdas on the stubble once at harvest
And the delta face of each potato pit
Was patted straight and moulded against frost.
    All gone, with the omega that kept
       
     
    Watch above each door, the good luck horse-shoe.
Yet shape-note language, absolute on air
As Constantine’s sky-lettered in hoc signo
    Can still command him; or the necromancer
       
     
    Who would hang from the domed ceiling of his house
A figure of the world with colours in it
So that the figure of the universe
    And ‘not just single things’ would meet his sight
       
     
    When he walked abroad. As from his small window
The astronaut sees all he has sprung from,
The risen, aqueous, singular, lucent Ο
    Like a magnified and buoyant ovum –
       
     
    Or like my own wide pre-reflective stare
All agog at the plasterer on his ladder
Skimming our gable and writing our name there
With his trowel point, letter by strange letter.

Terminus
     
     

I
     
    When I hoked there, I would find
    An acorn and a rusted bolt.
       
     
    If I lifted my eyes, a factory chimney
    And a dormant mountain.
       
     
    If I listened, an engine shunting
    And a trotting horse.
       
     
    Is it any wonder when I thought
I would have second thoughts?

II
     
    When they spoke of the prudent squirrel’s hoard
    It shone like gifts at a nativity.
       
     
    When they spoke of the mammon of iniquity
    The coins in my pockets reddened like stove-lids.
       
     
    I was the march drain and the march drain’s banks
Suffering the limit of each claim.

III
     
    Two buckets were easier carried than one.
I grew up in between.
       
     
    My left hand placed the standard iron weight.
    My right tilted a last grain in the balance.
       
     
    Baronies, parishes met where I was born.
    When I stood on the central stepping stone
       
     
    I was the last earl on horseback in midstream
Still parleying, in earshot of his peers.

From the Frontier of Writing
     
     
    The tightness and the nilness round that space
when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect
its make and number and, as one bends his face
       
     
    towards your window, you catch sight of more
on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent
    down cradled guns that hold you under cover
       
     
    and everything is pure interrogation
until a rifle motions and you move
    with guarded unconcerned acceleration –
       
     
    a little emptier, a little spent
as always by that quiver in the self,
    subjugated, yes, and obedient.
       
     
    So you drive on to the frontier of writing
where it happens again. The guns on tripods;
    the sergeant with his on-off mike repeating
       
     
    data about you, waiting for the squawk
of clearance; the marksman training down
    out of the sun upon you like a hawk.
       
     
    And suddenly you’re through, arraigned yet freed,
as if you’d passed from behind a waterfall
    on the black current of a tarmac road
       
     
    past armour-plated vehicles, out between
the posted soldiers flowing and receding
like tree shadows into the polished windscreen.

The Haw Lantern
     
     
    The wintry haw is burning out of season,
crab of the thorn, a small light for small people,
wanting no more from them but that they keep
the wick of self-respect from dying out,
    not having to blind them with illumination.
       
     
    But sometimes when your breath plumes in the frost
it takes the roaming shape of Diogenes
with his lantern, seeking one just man;
so you end