Michael Longley

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
...

My father, let no similes eclipse
Where crosses like some forest simplified
Sink roots into my mind, the slow sands
...

Achilles hunts down Hector like a sparrowhawk
Screeching after a horror-struck collared-dove
That flails just in front of her executioner, so
...

Cattle out of their byres are dungy still, lambs
Have stepped from last year as from an enclosure.
Five or six men stand gazing at a rusty tractor
...

They kept him alive for years in warm water,
The soldier who had lost his skin.
At night
...

Thirty-six years, to the day, after our wedding
When a cold figure-revealing wind blew against you
And lifted your veil, I find in its fat envelope
The six-shilling Vogue pattern for your bride's dress,
...

And, summing up, I think of when
With cloud and cloudburst you confer,
By God's sheer genius lifted there,
...

These are the small hours when
Moths by their fatal appetite
Which thatbrings them tapping to get in,
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Inauspicious between headstones
On Angel Hill, wintry love
Tokens for Murdo, Alistair,
...

A wintry night, the hearth inhales
And the chimney becomes a windpipe
Fluffy with soot and thistledown,
...

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
...

Dear old brother-in-law, I've flown home
Across the Atlantic. I'm far away, but you
...

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
...

This is your first night in Carrigskeewaun.
The Owennadornaun is so full of rain
You arrived in Paddy Morrison's tractor,
...

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,
...

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
...

Lighting up, lest all our hearts should break,
His fiftieth cigarette of the day,
Happy with so many notes at his beck
...

Put in mind of his own father and moved to tears
Achilles took him by the hand and pushed the old king
...

If you were to read my poems, all of them, I mean,
My life's work, at the one sitting, in the one place,
Let it be here by this half-hearted waterfall
That allows each pebbly basin its separate say,
...