Opened Ground (30 page)
Authors: Seamus Heaney
- St Kevin and the Blackbird
1 - Sandstone Keepsake
1 - Scrabble
1 - Scribes, The
1 - Seed Cutters, The
1 - Seeing Things
1 - Serenades
1 - Servant Boy
1 - Setting
1 - Settings
1 - Settle Bed, The
1 - Sheelagh na Gig
1 - Shelf Life,
from
1 - Shore Woman
1 - Sibyl
1 - Singer’s House, The
1 - Skunk, The
1 - Skylight, The
1 - Sloe Gin
1 - Sofa in the Forties, A
1 - Song
1 - Spoonbait, The
1 - Squarings
1 - Station Island
1 - Stations of the West, The
1 - Stone from Delphi
1 - Stone Verdict, The
1 - Strand, The
1 - Strand at Lough Beg, The
1 - Strange Fruit
1 - Summer 1969
1 - Summer Home
1 - Sunlight
1 - Sweeney in Flight
1 - Sweeney Redivivus
1 - Sweeney Redivivus,
from
1 - Swing, The
1
- A boat that did not rock or wobble once
1 - A carter’s trophy
1 - A cobble thrown a hundred years ago
1 - A gland agitating
1 - A hurry of bell-notes
1 - A latch lifting, an edged den of light
1 - A line goes out of sight and out of mind
1 - A rowan like a lipsticked girl
1 - A shadow his father makes with joined hands
1 - A soft whoosh, the sunset blaze
1 - A spirit moved, John Harvard walked the yard
1 - A stagger in air
1 - A thick crust, coarse-grained as limestone rough-cast
1 - Aeneas was praying and holding on the altar
1 - All
gone
into
the
world
of
light?
Perhaps
1 - All I know is a door into the dark
1 - All of us on the sofa in a line, kneeling
1 - All through that Sunday afternoon
1 - All year round the whin
1 - All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
1 - Always there would be stories of lights
1 - An old man’s hands, like soft paws rowing forward
1 - And lightening? One meaning of that
1 - And some time make the time to drive out west
1 - And strike this scene in gold too, in relief
1 - And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird
1 - And yes, my friend, we too walked through a valley
1 - Angling shadows of itself are what
1 - Any point in that wood
1 - As a child, they could not keep me from wells
1 - As he prowled the rim of his clearing
1 - As if a trespasser
1 - As if he had been poured
1 - As if the prisms of the kaleidoscope
1 - As you came with me in silence
1 - As you plaited the harvest bow
1 - At school I loved one picture’s heavy greenness
1 - At Troy, at Athens, what I most dearly
1
- Bare flags. Pump water. Winter-evening cold
1 - Be literal a moment. Recollect
1 - Bespoke for weeks, he turned up some morning
1 - Between my finger and my thumb
1 - Big voices in the womanless kitchen
1 - Black water. White waves. Furrows snowcapped
1 - Blurred swimmings as I faced the sun, my back
1 - Breaking and entering: from early on
1
- Everything flows. Even a solid man
1
- Hazel stealth. A trickle in the culvert
1 - He dwelt in himself
1 - He is wintering out
1 - He lived there in the unsayable lights
1 - He slashed the briars, shovelled up grey silt
1 - He would drink by himself
1 - Heather and kesh and turf-stacks reappear
1 - Here is the girl’s head like an exhumed gourd
1 - Hide in the hollow trunk
1 - His bicycle stood at the window-sill
1 - His hands were warm and small and knowledgeable
1 - ‘Hold on, ‘ she said, ‘I’ll just run out and get him’
1 - Houndstooth stone. Aberdeen of the mind
1
- I am afraid
1 - I can feel the tug
1 - I dreamt we slept on a moss in Donegal
1 - I had come to the edge of the water
1 - I have crossed the dunes with their whistling bent
1 - I heard new words prayed at cows
1 - I knelt. Hiatus. Habit’s afterlife
1 - I lay waiting
1 - I love the thought of his anger
1 - I met a girl from Derrygarve
1 - (I misremembered. He went down on all fours)
1 - I moved like a double agent among the big concepts
1 - I never warmed to them
1 - I returned to a long strand
1 - I sat all morning in the college sick bay
1 - I shouldered a kind of manhood
1 - I sit under Rand McNally’s
1 - I stepped it, perch by perch
1 - I stirred wet sand and gathered myself
1 - I stood between them
1 - I thought of her as the wishing tree that died
1 - I thought of walking round and round a space
1 - I used to lie with an ear to the line
1 - I was a lookout posted and forgotten
1 - I was four but I turned four hundred maybe
1 - I was parked on a high road, listening
1 - I went disguised in it
1 - I’m writing this just after an encounter
1 - In a semicircle we toed the line
1 - In famous poems by the sage Han Shan
1 - In ponds, drains, dead canals
1 - In the first flush of the Easter holidays
1 - In the last minutes he said more to her
1 - Inishbofin on a Sunday morning
1 - It could be a jaw-bone
1 - It had been badly shot
1 - It is a kind of chalky russet
1 - It is December in Wicklow
1 - It kept treading air
1 - It looked like a clump of small dusty nettles
1 - It rained when it should have snowed
1 - It was more sleepwalk than spasm
1 - It’s raining on black coal and warm wet ashes
1
- Labourers pedalling at ease
1 - Lamps dawdle in the field at midnight
1 - Late August, given heavy rain and sun
1 - Late summer, and at midnight
1 - Leaving the white glow of filling stations
1 - Light as a skiff, manoeuvrable
1 - Light was calloused in the leaded panes
1 - Like a convalescent, I took the hand
1 - Love, I shall perfect for you the child
1
- Matutinal. Mother-of-pearl
1 - Memory as a building or a city
1 - Mountain air from the mountain up behind
1 - Morning stir in the hostel. A pot
1 - ‘My brain dried like spread turf, my stomach’
1 - My cheek was hit and hit
1 - My father worked with a horse-plough
1 - My mouth holds round
1 - My ‘place of clear water’
1 - My tongue moved, a swung relaxing hinge
1
- No such thing
1
- Of all implements, the pitchfork was the one
1 - Often I watched her lift it
1 - On Devenish I heard a snipe
1 - On my first night in the Gaeltacht
1 - On St Brigid’s Day the new life could be entered
1 - On the day of their excursion up the Thames
1 - On the most westerly Blasket
1 - ‘On you go now! Run, son, like the devil’
1 - Once, as a child, out in a field of sheep
1 - Once we presumed to found ourselves for good
1 - One afternoon I was seraph on gold leaf
1 - One morning early I met armoured cars
1 - Or, as we said
1 - Our shells clacked on the plates
1 - Outside the kitchen window a black rat
1 - Overhang of grass and seedling birch
1
- Polished linoleum shone there. Brass taps shone
1
- Sand-bed, they said. And gravel-bed. Before
1 - Scissor-and-slap abruptness of a latch
1 - Scuts of froth swirled from the discharge pipe
1 - Scythe and axe and hedge-clippers, the shriek
1 - Sensings, mountings from the hiding places
1 - She came every morning to draw water
1 - She would plunge all poets in the ninth circle
1 - Shifting brilliancies. Then winter light
1 - Sky-born and royal
1 - So, he would pay his ‘debt to medicine’
1 - So a new similitude is given us
1 - Soft corrugations in the boortree’s trunk
1 - Some day I will go to Aarhus
1 - Some people wept, and not for sorrow – joy
1 - Squarings? In the game of marbles, squarings
1 - Statues with exposed hearts and barbed-wire crowns
1 - Strange how things in the offing, once they’re sensed
1
- Take hold of the shaft of the pen
1 - That Sunday morning we had travelled far
1 - The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
1 - The big missal splayed
1 - The bronze soldier hitches a bronze cape
1 - The clear weather of juniper
1 - The cool that came off sheets just off the line
1 - The deal table where he wrote, so small and plain
1 - The dotted line my father’s ashplant made
1 - The drumming started in the cool of the evening, as if the
1 - The 56 lb weight. A solid iron
1 - The first real grip I ever got on things
1 - The following for the record, in the light
1 - The guttersnipe and the albatross
1 - The Irish nightingale
1 - The lambeg balloons at his belly, weighs
1 - The living mother-of-pearl of a salmon
1 - The lough waters
1 - The lough will claim a victim every year
1 - The man the hare has met
1 - The piper coming from far away is you
1 - The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley
1 - The riverbed, dried-up, half-full of leaves
1 - The road ahead
1 - The royal roads were cow paths
1 - The sandmartins’ nests were loopholes of darkness
1 - The smells of ordinariness
1 - The teacher let some big boys out at two
1 - The tightness and the nilness round that space
1 - The visible sea at a distance from the shore
1 - The wintry haw is burning out of season
1 - Then all of a sudden there appears to me
1 - There they were, as if our memory hatched them
1 - There was a sunlit absence
1 - There we were in the vaulted tunnel running
1 - They both needed to talk
1 - They seem hundreds of years away. Brueghel
1 - They’re busy in a high boat
1 - Thigh-deep in sedge and marigolds
1 - Three marble holes thumbed in the concrete road
1 - Threshed corn lay piled like grit of ivory
1 - Thunderlight on the split logs: big raindrops
1 - To be carried back to the shrine some dawn
1 - Tonight, a first movement, a pulse
1
Other books
Mal de altura by Jon Krakauer
A New World: Awakening by John O'Brien
Cómo descubrimos el petróleo by Isaac Asimov
Masquerade by Dahlia Rose
The Wielder: Sworn Vengeance (The Wielder Series) by Gosnell, David
Kane: An Assassin's Love Story by Saxton, R.E., Tunstall, Kit
Maze Running and other Magical Missions by Lari Don
The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To by DC Pierson
Midsummer Magic by Julia Williams
Every Single Second by Tricia Springstubb