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.