Seamus Heaney, Rest in Peace
Though you never knew me, more than a knowing nod
From the TV; though you near-wept as you read
About your father, a blackbird, and more, much more;
And though you were the festival in your finite life,
Now stroll, beyond all wanderings, naming no error
In those halcyon gardens where all are careless with their
Care; now amble, don’t hesitate: there the poems are quiet
As fires without denizens or hasty feelings for the air
In which they billow, yellow, red, blue as an apple-core…
No. You are not dead, spent, gone. You are
What the birds sing at hallowed morning, knowing the more
In store, knowing what good speed, what loaded dares
Are meant by the passing of a bard to the middle
Of everything. To the middle of love. That’s all.
The Bird In The Tree
It was as if
a film
of surreal gloss
Circled the triangle
Of that figure – so black
It was purple;
a painter’s wicked slash
Of coal-grey across
the black breast,
a heart-thick
diagonal,
The only sign of life, or of interest
In the same…
The bird in the tree
seemed lost,
Foundering, a perched dream through a crack
In the seam
of the workaday reality.
Was it silly of me to see
That weird
White-lined aura that freed
The bird from the custom of the picture?
As though some wraith, a slim cure,
Some rapier
Of sublime pencil
Had tracked its shape
To a strangely-mental
Completion –
it was no more bird,
no more simple
Avatar / epigone
of the reptile,
But a voice in black in the white world,
But a voice on the eye that the eye heard.