New and Selected Poems (8 page)

II

 

And I am still imperially

Male, leaving you with the pain,

The rending process in the colony,

The battering ram, the boom burst from within.

The act sprouted an obstinate fifth column

Whose stance is growing unilateral.

His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum

Mustering force. His parasitical

And ignorant little fists already

Beat at your borders and I know they’re cocked

At me across the water. No treaty

I foresee will salve completely your tracked

And stretchmarked body, the big pain

That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again.

Sky-born and royal,

snake-choker, dung-heaver,

his mind big with golden apples,

his future hung with trophies,

   

 

Hercules has the measure

of resistance and black powers

feeding off the territory.

Antaeus, the mould-hugger,

   

 

is weaned at last:

a fall was a renewal

but now he is raised up –

the challenger’s intelligence

   

 

is a spur of light,

a blue prong graiping him

out of his element

into a dream of loss

   

 

and origins – the cradling dark,

the river-veins, the secret gullies

of his strength,

the hatching grounds

   

 

of cave and souterrain,

he has bequeathed it all

to elegists. Balor will die

and Byrthnoth and Sitting Bull.

   

 

Hercules lifts his arms

in a remorseless V,

his triumph unassailed

by the powers he has shaken

   

 

and lifts and banks Antaeus

high as a profiled ridge,

a sleeping giant,

pap for the dispossessed.

I

 

I’m writing this just after an encounter

With an English journalist in search of ‘views

On the Irish thing’. I’m back in winter

Quarters where bad news is no longer news,

   

 

Where media-men and stringers sniff and point,

Where zoom lenses, recorders and coiled leads

Litter the hotels. The times are out of joint

But I incline as much to rosary beads

   

 

As to the jottings and analyses

Of politicians and newspapermen

Who’ve scribbled down the long campaign from gas

And protest to gelignite and sten,

   

 

Who proved upon their pulses ‘escalate’,

‘Backlash’ and ‘crack down’, ‘the provisional wing’,

‘Polarization’ and ‘long-standing hate’.

Yet I live here, I live here too, I sing,

   

 

Expertly civil tongued with civil neighbours

On the high wires of first wireless reports,

Sucking the fake taste, the stony flavours

Of those sanctioned, old, elaborate retorts:

   

 

‘Oh, it’s disgraceful, surely, I agree.’

‘Where’s it going to end?’ ‘It’s getting worse.’

‘They’re murderers.’ ‘Internment, understandably …’

The ‘voice of sanity’ is getting hoarse.

III

 

‘Religion’s never mentioned here,’ of course.

‘You know them by their eyes,’ and hold your tongue.

‘One side’s as bad as the other,’ never worse.

Christ, it’s near time that some small leak was sprung

   

 

In the great dykes the Dutchman made

To dam the dangerous tide that followed Seamus.

Yet for all this art and sedentary trade

I am incapable. The famous

   

 

Northern reticence, the tight gag of place

And times: yes, yes. Of the ‘wee six’ I sing

Where to be saved you only must save face

And whatever you say, you say nothing.

   

 

Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us:

Manoeuvrings to find out name and school,

Subtle discrimination by addresses

With hardly an exception to the rule

   

 

That Norman, Ken and Sidney signalled Prod

And Seamus (call me Sean) was sure-fire Pape.

Ο land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,

Of open minds as open as a trap,

   

 

Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks,

Where half of us, as in a wooden horse

Were cabin’d and confined like wily Greeks,

Besieged within the siege, whispering morse.

IV

 

This morning from a dewy motorway

I saw the new camp for the internees:

A bomb had left a crater of fresh clay

In the roadside, and over in the trees

   

 

Machine-gun posts defined a real stockade.

There was that white mist you get on a low ground

And it was déjà-vu, some film made

Of Stalag 17, a bad dream with no sound.

   

 

Is there a life before death? That’s chalked up

In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,

Coherent miseries, a bite and sup,

We hug our little destiny again.

Fair seedtime had my soul, and I grew up
Fostered alike by beauty and by fear;
Much favoured in my birthplace, and no less
In that beloved Vale to which, erelong
,
I was transplanted
…

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
:
The Prelude

He [the stable-boy] had a book of Orange rhymes, and
the days when we read them together in the hay-loft
gave me the pleasure of rhyme for the first time. Later on
I can remember being told, when there was a rumour of
a Fenian rising, that rifles were being handed out to the
Orangemen; and presently, when I began to dream of
my future life, I thought I would like to die fighting the
Fenians
.

W. B. YEATS
:
Autobiographies

Well, as Kavanagh said, we have lived

In important places. The lonely scarp

Of St Columb’s College, where I billeted

For six years, overlooked your Bogside.

I gazed into new worlds: the inflamed throat

Of Brandywell, its floodlit dogtrack,

The throttle of the hare. In the first week

I was so homesick I couldn’t even eat

The biscuits left to sweeten my exile.

I threw them over the fence one night

In September 1951

When the lights of houses in the Lecky Road

Were amber in the fog. It was an act

Of stealth.

                        Then Belfast, and then Berkeley.

Here’s two on’s are sophisticated,

Dabbling in verses till they have become

A life: from bulky envelopes arriving

In vacation time to slim volumes

Despatched ‘with the author’s compliments’.

Those poems in longhand, ripped from the wire spine

Of your exercise book, bewildered me –

Vowels and ideas bandied free

As the seed-pods blowing off our sycamores.

I tried to write about the sycamores

And innovated a South Derry rhyme

With
hushed
and
lulled
full chimes for
pushed
and
pulled
.

Those hobnailed boots from beyond the mountain

Were walking, by God, all over the fine

Lawns of elocution.

                                            Have our accents

Changed? ‘Catholics, in general, don’t speak

As well as students from the Protestant schools.’

Remember that stuff? Inferiority

Complexes, stuff that dreams were made on.

‘What’s your name, Heaney?’

                                                              ‘Heaney, Father.’

                                                                                                ‘Fair

Enough.’

                    On my first day, the leather strap

Went epileptic in the Big Study,

Its echoes plashing over our bowed heads,

But I still wrote home that a boarder’s life

Was not so bad, shying as usual.

   

 

On long vacations, then, I came to life

In the kissing seat of an Austin Sixteen

Parked at a gable, the engine running,

My fingers tight as ivy on her shoulders,

A light left burning for her in the kitchen.

And heading back for home, the summer’s

Freedom dwindling night by night, the air

All moonlight and a scent of hay, policemen

Swung their crimson flashlamps, crowding round

The car like black cattle, snuffing and pointing

The muzzle of a sten-gun in my eye:

‘What’s your name, driver?’

                                                    ‘Seamus …’

                                                                            
Seamus
?

They once read my letters at a roadblock

And shone their torches on your hieroglyphics,

‘Svelte dictions’ in a very florid hand.

   

 

Ulster was British, but with no rights on

The English lyric: all around us, though

We hadn’t named it, the ministry of fear.