Free New and Selected Poems by Seamus Heaney Page A

up scrutinized from behind the haw
he holds up at eye-level on its twig,
and you flinch before its bonded pith and stone,
its blood-prick that you wish would test and clear you,
its pecked-at ripeness that scans you, then moves on.

From the Republic of Conscience
     
     

I
     
    When I landed in the republic of conscience
it was so noiseless when the engines stopped
    I could hear a curlew high above the runway.
       
     
    At immigration, the clerk was an old man
who produced a wallet from his homespun coat
    and showed me a photograph of my grandfather.
       
     
    The woman in customs asked me to declare
the words of our traditional cures and charms
    to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye.
       
     
    No porters. No interpreter. No taxi.
You carried your own burden and very soon
your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.

II
     
    Fog is a dreaded omen there but lightning
spells universal good and parents hang
    swaddled infants in trees during thunderstorms.
       
     
    Salt is their precious mineral. And seashells
are held to the ear during births and funerals.
The base of all inks and pigments is seawater.
       
     
    Their sacred symbol is a stylized boat.
The sail is an ear, the mast a sloping pen,
    The hull a mouth-shape, the keel an open eye.
       
     
    At their inauguration, public leaders
must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep
    to atone for their presumption to hold office –
       
     
    and to affirm their faith that all life sprang
from salt in tears which the sky-god wept
after he dreamt his solitude was endless.

III
     
    I came back from that frugal republic
with my two arms the one length, the customs woman
    having insisted my allowance was myself.
       
     
    The old man rose and gazed into my face
and said that was official recognition
    that I was now a dual citizen.
       
     
    He therefore desired me when I got home
to consider myself a representative
    and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue.
       
     
    Their embassies, he said, were everywhere
but operated independently
and no ambassador would ever be relieved.

Hailstones
     
     

I
     
    My cheek was hit and hit:
sudden hailstones
    pelted and bounced on the road.
       
     
    When it cleared again
something whipped and knowledgeable
    had withdrawn
       
     
    and left me there with my chances.
I made a small hard ball
    of burning water running from my hand
       
     
    just as I make this now
out of the melt of the real thing
smarting into its absence.

II
     
    To be reckoned with, all the same,
those brats of showers.
    The way they refused permission,
       
     
    rattling the classroom window
like a ruler across the knuckles,
the way they were perfect first
       
     
    and then in no time dirty slush.
Thomas Traherne had his orient wheat
    for proof and wonder
       
     
    but for us, it was the sting of hailstones
and the unstingable hands of Eddie Diamond
foraging in the nettles.

III
     
    Nipple and hive, bite-lumps,
small acorns of the almost pleasurable
    intimated and disallowed
       
     
    when the shower ended
and everything said wait .
    For what? For forty years
       
     
    to say there, there you had
the truest foretaste of your aftermath –
    in that dilation
       
     
    when the light opened in silence
and a car with wipers going still
laid perfect tracks in the slush.

The Stone Verdict
     
     
    When he stands in the judgment place
With his stick in his hand and the broad hat
Still on his head, maimed by self-doubt
And an old disdain of sweet talk and excuses,
It will be no justice if the sentence is blabbed out.
He will expect more than words in the ultimate court
    He relied on through a lifetime’s speechlessness.
       
     
    Let it be like the judgment of Hermes,
God of the stone heap, where the stones were verdicts
Cast solidly at his feet, piling up around him
Until he stood waist deep in the cairn
Of his apotheosis: maybe a gate-pillar
Or a tumbled wallstead where hogweed earths the silence
Somebody