Read Online New and Selected Poems by Seamus Heaney - Free Book Online

and sizzled. As he moved off quickly
       
     
    the downpour loosed its screens round his straight walk.

from Sweeney Redivivus
     
     

In the Beech
     
    I was a lookout posted and forgotten.
       
     
    On one side under me, the concrete road.
On the other, the bullocks’ covert,
the breath and plaster of a drinking place
where the school-leaver discovered peace
    to touch himself in the reek of churned-up mud.
       
     
    And the tree itself a strangeness and a comfort,
as much a column as a bole. The very ivy
puzzled its milk-tooth frills and tapers
    over the grain: was it bark or masonry?
       
     
    I watched the red-brick chimney rear
its stamen course by course,
and the steeplejacks up there at their antics
    like flies against the mountain.
       
     
    I felt the tanks’ advance beginning
at the cynosure of the growth rings,
then winced at their imperium refreshed
in each powdered bolt-mark on the concrete.
And the pilot with his goggles back came in
    so low I could see the cockpit rivets.
       
     
    My hidebound boundary tree. My tree of knowledge.
My thick-tapped, soft-fledged, airy listening post.

The First Kingdom
     
     
    The royal roads were cow paths.
The queen mother hunkered on a stool
and played the harpstrings of milk
into a wooden pail.
With seasoned sticks the nobles
    lorded it over the hindquarters of cattle.
       
     
    Units of measurement were pondered
by the cartful, barrowful and bucketful.
Time was a backward rote of names and mishaps,
bad harvests, fires, unfair settlements,
    deaths in floods, murders and miscarriages.
       
     
    And if my rights to it all came only
by their acclamation, what was it worth?
I blew hot and blew cold.
They were two-faced and accommodating.
And seed, breed and generation still
they are holding on, every bit
as pious and exacting and demeaned.

The First Flight
     
     
    It was more sleepwalk than spasm
yet that was a time when the times
    were also in spasm –
       
     
    the ties and the knots running through us
split open
    down the lines of the grain.
       
     
    As I drew close to pebbles and berries,
the smell of wild garlic, relearning
    the acoustic of frost
       
     
    and the meaning of woodnote,
my shadow over the field
    was only a spin-off,
       
     
    my empty place an excuse
for shifts in the camp, old rehearsals
    of debts and betrayal.
       
     
    Singly they came to the tree
with a stone in each pocket
    to whistle and bill me back in
       
     
    and I would collide and cascade
through leaves when they left,
my point of repose knocked askew.
       
     
    I was mired in attachment
until they began to pronounce me
    a feeder off battlefields
       
     
    so I mastered new rungs of the air
to survey out of reach
    their bonfires on hills, their hosting
       
     
    and fasting, the levies from Scotland
as always, and the people of art
    diverting their rhythmical chants
       
     
    to fend off the onslaught of winds
I would welcome and climb
at the top of my bent.

Drifting Off
     
     
    The guttersnipe and the albatross
gliding for days without a single wingbeat
    were equally beyond me.
       
     
    I yearned for the gannet’s strike,
the unbegrudging concentration
    of the heron.
       
     
    In the camaraderie of rookeries,
in the spiteful vigilance of colonies
    I was at home.
       
     
    I learned to distrust
the allure of the cuckoo
    and the gossip of starlings,
       
     
    kept faith with doughty bullfinches,
levelled my wit too often
    to the small-minded wren
       
     
    and too often caved in
to the pathos of waterhens
    and panicky corncrakes.
       
     
    I gave much credence to stragglers,
overrated the composure of blackbirds
and the folklore of magpies.
       
     
    But when goldfinch or kingfisher rent
the veil of the usual,
    pinions whispered and braced
       
     
    as I stooped, unwieldy
and brimming,
my spurs at the ready.

The Cleric
     
     
    I heard new words prayed at cows
in the byre, found his sign
    on the crock and the