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the land is not settled The land is not yet settled After our years of pandemonium. This time it is almost too late To sing with full heart a parting hymn, Or indulge in the usual fickle Humour of things. It is too late To bolt the door of Ireland. A penny candle struggles in the wind, A corpse from the West rises To face me. What was a house now stands As a ghost from the assizes. Believe me, I tried to understand All the signals we received from Berlin. Little did they know, in our autonomous Region all the gold was gorse, And all investment was storytelling. Blackbirds in the oak trees are trembling still Where all our demons hurriedly went in. 12
page 13
the hope of finding something i.m. Seamus Heaney What a fool I am to be going into this new bookshop, Knowing that our poet is dead. The happiness of youth And all its insatiable dreams, the first book I could afford, The first kiss, the first breast, the first summer night To fall asleep with someone in my arms, the first words She spoke to me were his. She didn’t want me to stop Listening and I didn’t want the long summer to stop. She pointed exactly to where I never wished to go, Having lately escaped from an oppression of such fields: I did not wish to return to where I was nothing. So Adamant was her love for his new books I baulked At the very thought of attachment. Now I know The true weight of love, what it’s ordinary to know In a secured home, in a freehold with boundaries – Back then I couldn’t tell. Back then I was too alone With social resentment, and cut too far adrift, To catch the subtlety of his bogs and blackberries. I had missed the ordinary and its tectonic shift Within Irish life. Strong as Ireland in her makeshift Tent, she knew words were about her and not about him, However much she loved his vowel sounds. Sing, sing Like Ulster, she said, but go and find your own theme. I saw her by his coffin as it passed. Now that we’re cut adrift, I’ll try this bookshop in the hope of finding something. 13

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the land is not settled

The land is not yet settled After our years of pandemonium. This time it is almost too late To sing with full heart a parting hymn, Or indulge in the usual fickle Humour of things. It is too late

To bolt the door of Ireland. A penny candle struggles in the wind, A corpse from the West rises To face me. What was a house now stands As a ghost from the assizes. Believe me, I tried to understand

All the signals we received from Berlin. Little did they know, in our autonomous Region all the gold was gorse, And all investment was storytelling. Blackbirds in the oak trees are trembling still Where all our demons hurriedly went in.

12

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