Free District and Circle by Seamus Heaney Page A

bound him hand and foot,
    they flung him down and flayed him,
    gashing his flesh on thorny
aspalathoi,
    and threw him into Tartarus, torn to shreds.”
    As was only right
    for a tyrant. But still, for you, maybe
    too much i’ the right, too black and white,
    if still your chance to strike
    against his ilk,
    a last word meant to break
    your much contested silence.
    And for me a chance to test the edge
    of
seggans,
dialect blade
    hoar and harder and more hand-to-hand
    than what is common usage nowadays:
    sedge—marshmallow, rubber-dagger stuff.

WORDSWORTH’S SKATES
    Star in the window.
                                      Slate scrape.
                                                        Bird or branch?
    Or the whet and scud of steel on placid ice?
    Not the bootless runners lying toppled
    In dust in a display case,
    Their bindings perished,
    But the reel of them on frozen Windermere
    As he flashed from the clutch of earth along its curve
    And left it scored.

THE HARROW-PIN
    We’d be told, “If you don’t behave
    There’ll be nothing in your Christmas stocking for you
    But an old kale stalk.” And we would believe him.
    But if kale meant admonition, a harrow-pin
    Was correction’s veriest unit.
    Head-banged spike, forged fang, a true dead ringer
    Out of a harder time, it was a stake
    He’d drive through aspiration and pretence
    For our instruction.
    Let there once be any talk of decoration,
    A shelf for knick-knacks, a picture-hook or -rail,
    And the retort was instant: “Drive a harrow-pin.”
    Brute-forced, rusted, haphazardly set pins
    From harrows wrecked by horse-power over stones
    Lodged in the stable wall and on them hung
    Horses’ collars lined with sweat-veined ticking,
    Old cobwebbed reins and hames and eye-patched winkers,
    The tackle of the mighty, simple dead.
    Out there, in musts of bedding cut with piss
    He put all to the test. Inside, in the house,
    Ungulled, irreconcilable,
    And horse-sensed as the travelled Gulliver,
    What virtue he approved (and would assay)
    Was in hammered iron.

POET TO BLACKSMITH
    Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin’s (1748
–
84) instructions to
    Séamus MacGearailt, translated from the Irish
    Séamus, make me a side-arm to take on the earth,
    A suitable tool for digging and grubbing the ground,
    Lightsome and pleasant to lean on or cut with or lift,
    Tastily finished and trim and right for the hand.
    No trace of the hammer to show on the sheen of the blade,
    The thing to have purchase and spring and be fit for the strain,
    The shaft to be socketed in dead true and dead straight,
    And I’ll work with the gang till I drop and never complain.
    The plate and the edge of it not to be wrinkly or crooked—
    I see it well shaped from the anvil and sharp from the file,
    The grain of the wood and the line of the shaft nicely fitted,
    And best thing of all, the ring of it, sweet as a bell.

MIDNIGHT ANVIL
    If I wasn’t there
    When Barney Devlin hammered
    The midnight anvil
    I can still hear it: twelve blows
    Struck for the millennium.

    His nephew heard it
    In Edmonton, Alberta:
    The cellular phone
    Held high as a horse’s ear,
    Barney smiling to himself.

    Afterwards I thought
    Church bels beyond the starres heard
    And then imagined
    Barney putting it to me:
    “You’ll maybe write a poem.”

    What I’ll do instead
    Is quote those waterburning
    Medieval smiths:
    “Huf, puf! Lus, bus! Col!”
Such noise
    On nights heard no one never.

    And Eoghan Rua
    Asking Séamus MacGearailt
    To forge him a spade
    Sharp, well shaped from the anvil,
    And ringing
sweet as a bell.

SÚGÁN
    The fluster of that soft supply and feed—
    Hay being coaxed in handfuls from a ruck,
    Paid out to be taken in by furl and swivel,
    Turned and tightened, rickety-rick, to rope—
    Though just as often at the other end
    I’d manipulate the hook,
    Walking backwards, winding for all I was worth
    By snag and by sag the long and the short