An Elegy

Flora in the roadside ditch are boasting the water-colour purple of a pride of bishops – vetch, knapweed, clover and the rosebay willow herb; and I would make a poem the way old Bruckner caught a flight of pelicans in his Ecce sacerdos magnus… for eight-part choir, key magenta, though these times the spirit slumps, mal tended in this limping country. Now a blackcap, fast and furtive, comes to feast on the white berries of the dogwood hedge; bullfinch, secretive, subdued, flit in a shock of rose-petal black and white across the alder thicket and I am urged to praise, willing to have the poem speak the improbable wonderful. Today the poet Seamus Heaney said he was leaving us for a while, visiting high mountain pastures,

and seeing things. I have been walking, grieved, the Slievemore heathlands and watching a sheep-dog, low-crouched, eager, waiting for the sheepman’s whistle;

furze blazed with a cool gold flame; the sheep were marked with blobs of red and purple dye, cumbered with dried-in mud; while out on the bay the Crested Grebe moved, masterful, in brown Connemara tweed.

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