Michael Longley

I am the trout that vanishes Between the stepping stones. I am the elver that lingers Under the little bridge. I am the leveret that breakfasts Close to the fuchsia hedge. I am the stoat that dances Around the erratic boulder. I am the skein of sheep’s wool Wind and barbed wire tangle. I am the mud and spittle That make the swallows’ nest. I am the stonechat’s music Of...

in memory of Seamus Heaney

I

I blew a kiss across the stage to you When we read our poems in Lisdoonvarna Two weeks before you died. Arrayed in straw The Armagh Rhymers turned up at the end.

II

In the middle of a field in Mourne country Standing side by side, looking straight ahead We peed against a fragment of stone wall, St Patrick’s windbreak, the rain’s urinal.

III

...

I All ears in the Mugello What with the far cuckoo, The harmonising frog And crickets everywhere, Domestic sounds as well – Heidi baking a chestnut Cake, Lorenzo’s ladder Scraping the cherry tree – We find in Silvano’s Sloping upper meadow Close to the wood, regal Among seeding grasses, An orchid, each lower lip A streamer, extroversion Requiring subtle...

What’s the Greek for boat, You ask, old friend, Fellow voyager Approaching Ithaca – Oh, flatulent sails, Wave-winnowing oars, Shingle-scrunching keel – But, so close to home, There’s a danger always Of amnesiac storms, Waterlogged words.

You are dying. Why do we fight? You find my first published poem – ‘Not worth the paper it’s...

I’m thinking of the pope and you, Eddie, As I dander towards the New York Public Library to peek at the field notebooks Of Edward Thomas wandering in England In pursuit of spring before poetry and war. Somewhere between Dorval and La Guardia I encountered John Paul among the clouds Like a surge of energy from the engines. Now he lies stiff and full of...

Sarah drew a hare under a sky full of large stars When she was ten: now, more than a childhood later, In antique Paraty where the sea seeps up the street Depositing between boulder-sized cobbles sand And the feathers of snowy egrets and frigate birds, We meet the hare again, an ‘indigenous artefact’, And want to know everything about the animal, Its crouching body...

Why, my dear octogenarian Jewish friend, Does the menagerie of minuscule glass animals On top of your TV set not include a skunk? I have been travelling around in America, Sleeping in wooden houses with squeaky floors, Landings hung with pictures of lost relatives, Professors, station-masters, wise embroiderers. Driving along the Delaware my poet-host Stops to let two wild turkeys...

He would have been a hundred today, my father, So I write to him in the trenches and describe How he lifts with tongs from the brazier an ember And in its glow reads my words and sets them aside.

You are dying and not sleeping soundly because Your eyes stay open and it doesn’t seem to hurt. We want you to blink and find three of us standing For a few...

In the Phrygian hills an oak tree grows beside a lime tree And a low wall encloses them. Not far away lies bogland. I have seen the spot myself. It should convince you – If you need to be convinced – that the power of heaven Is limitless, that whatever the gods desire gets done.

Where a drowned valley makes a sanctuary for water birds (Divers, coots), a whole community used to...

When he had made sure there were no survivors in his house And that all the suitors were dead, heaped in blood and dust Like fish that fishermen with fine-meshed nets have hauled Up gasping for salt-water, evaporating in the sunshine, Odysseus, spattered with muck and like a lion dripping blood From his chest and cheeks after devouring a farmer’s bullock, Ordered the disloyal housemaids...

The moon beams like Eva Braun’s bare bottom On rockets aimed at London, then at the sky Where, in orbit to the dark side, astronauts Read from Mein Kompf to a delighted world.

Though the partition opens at a touch She makes a pin-hole and watches people Watching the sky where a heavy bomber Journeys to her mirror and jar of rouge.

No room has ever been as silent...