Seamus Heaney Poems

I

To-night, a first movement, a pulse,
As if the rain in bogland gathered head
...

So winter closed its fist
And got it stuck in the pump.
The plunger froze up a lump
...

Air from another life and time and place,
Pale blue heavenly air is supporting
A white wing beating high against the breeze,
...

I was six when I first saw kittens drown.
Dan Taggart pitched them, 'the scraggy wee shits',
Into a bucket; a frail metal sound,
...

It is December in Wicklow:
Alders dripping, birches
Inheriting the last light,
The ash tree cold to look at.
...

The tightness and the nilness round that space
when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect
its make and number and, as one bends his face
...

There, in the corner, staring at his drink.
The cap juts like a gantry's crossbeam,
Cowling plated forehead and sledgehead jaw.
Speech is clamped in the lips' vice.
...

Fishermen at Ballyshannon
Netted an infant last night
Along with the salmon.
An illegitimate spawning,
...

for Michael Longley

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
...

I

He would drink by himself
And raise a weathered thumb
...