Seamus Heaney

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.
In the porch I met my father crying—

As if he had been poured
in tar, he lies
on a pillow of turf
and seems to weep

For Ann Saddlemyer,
our heartiest welcomer
I
Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground.

My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horses strained at his clicking tongue.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:

All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.

In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984
She taught me what her uncle once taught her:
How easily the biggest coal block split
If you got the grain and hammer angled right.

I
He would drink by himself
And raise a weathered thumb
Towards the high shelf,

for Philip Hobsbaum
Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot