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Seamus Heaney
1939-2013
"Personal Helicon"
for Michael Longley
- As a child, they could not keep me from wells
- And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
- I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
- Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.
- One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
- I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
- Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
- So deep you saw no reflection in it.
- A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
- Fructified like any aquarium.
- When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
- A white face hovered over the bottom.
- Others had echoes, gave back your own call
- With a clean new music in it. And one
- Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
- Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.
- Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
- To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
- Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
- To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
© Seamus Heaney
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