I.
Your mother walks light as an empty creel
Unlearning the intimate nudge and pull
Your trussed-up weight of seed-flesh and bone-curd
Had insisted on. That evicted world
Contracts round its history, its scar.
Doomsday struck when your collapsed sphere
Extinguished itself in our atmosphere,
Your mother heavy with the lightness in her.
II.
For six months you stayed cartographer
Charting my friend from husband towards father.
He guessed a globe behind your steady mound.
Then the pole fell, shooting star, into the ground.
III.
On lonely journeys I think of it all,
Birth of death, exhumation for burial;
A wreath of small clothes, a memorial pram
And parents reaching for a phantom limb.
I drive by remote control on this bare road
Under a drizzling sky, a circling rock.
Past mountain fields full to the brim with cloud.
White waves riding home on a wintry lough.
by Seamus Heaney (ca. 1966)
05 November 2010
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1 comments:
While we might not be able to expect our family and friends to write or articulate such hauntingly familiar and powerful sentiments, how helpful it would be if everyone could show such observation and sympathy. Thank you for sharing this. I have added it to Drew's page.
Sending you love!
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