Michael Longley Poems

A fastidious brewer of tea, a tea
Connoisseur as well as a poet,
I modestly request on my sixtieth
Birthday a gift of snow water.
...

We were combatants from the start. Our dad
Bought us boxing gloves when we were ten —
Champions like Euryalus, say, or Epeius
...

Pulling up flax after the blue flowers have fallen
And laying our handfuls in the peaty water
To rot those grasses to the bone, or building stooks
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This is your first night in Carrigskeewaun.
The Owennadornaun is so full of rain
You arrived in Paddy Morrison's tractor,
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You showed me my twin's feet when he was dead,
Your sailor-husband's feet, your engineer's - how
Cold they felt, how handsome ankle and toe,
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As if a one-room schoolhouse were all we knew
And our clothes were black, our underclothes black,
Marriage a horse and buggy going to church
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Inauspicious between headstones
On Angel Hill, wintry love
Tokens for Murdo, Alistair,
...

Dear old brother-in-law, I've flown home
Across the Atlantic. I'm far away, but you
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A wintry night, the hearth inhales
And the chimney becomes a windpipe
Fluffy with soot and thistledown,
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Let me make room for bog cotton, a desert flower -
Keith Douglas, I nearly repeat what you were saying
When you apostrophised the poppies of Flanders
...