Opened Ground by Seamus Heaney

staring across at the watch-towers
    from my free state of image and allusion,
    swooped on, then dropped by trained binoculars:
    a silhouette not worth bothering about,
    out for the evening in scarf and waders
    and not about to set times wrong or right,
    stooping along, one of the venerators.

Granite Chip
    Houndstooth stone. Aberdeen of the mind.
    Saying An union in the cup I’ll throw
    I have hurt my hand, pressing it hard around
    this bit hammered off Joyce’s Martello
    Tower, this flecked insoluble brilliant
    I keep but feel little in common with –
    a kind of stone-age circumcising knife,
    a Calvin edge in my complaisant pith.
    Granite is jaggy, salty, punitive
    and exacting. Come to me, it says
    all you who labour and are burdened, I
    will not refresh you. And it adds, Seize
    the day. And, You can take me or leave me.

Old Smoothing Iron
    Often I watched her lift it
    from where its compact wedge
    rode the back of the stove
    like a tug at anchor.
    To test its heat she’d stare
    and spit in its iron face
    or hold it up next her cheek
    to divine the stored danger.
    Soft thumps on the ironing board.
    Her dimpled angled elbow
    and intent stoop
    as she aimed the smoothing iron
    like a plane into linen,
    like the resentment of women.
    To work, her dumb lunge says,
    is to move a certain mass
    through a certain distance,
    is to pull your weight and feel
    exact and equal to it.
    Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.

Stone from Delphi
    To be carried back to the shrine some dawn
    when the sea spreads its far sun-crops to the south
    and I make a morning offering again:
    that I may escape the miasma of spilled blood,
    govern the tongue, fear hybris, fear the god
    until he speaks in my untrammelled mouth.

Making Strange
    I stood between them,
    the one with his travelled intelligence
    and tawny containment,
    his speech like the twang of a bowstring,
    and another, unshorn and bewildered
    in the tubs of his Wellingtons,
    smiling at me for help,
    faced with this stranger I’d brought him.
    Then a cunning middle voice
    came out of the field across the road
    saying, ‘Be adept and be dialect,
    tell of this wind coming past the zinc hut,
    call me sweetbriar after the rain
    or snowberries cooled in the fog.
    But love the cut of this travelled one
    and call me also the cornfield of Boaz.
    Go beyond what’s reliable
    in all that keeps pleading and pleading,
    these eyes and puddles and stones,
    and recollect how bold you were
    when I visited you first
    with departures you cannot go back on.’
    A chaffinch flicked from an ash and next thing
    I found myself driving the stranger
     
    through my own country, adept
    at dialect, reciting my pride
    in all that I knew, that began to make strange
    at that same recitation.

The Birthplace
    I
    The deal table where he wrote, so small and plain,
    the single bed a dream of discipline.
    And a flagged kitchen downstairs, its mote-slants
    of thick light: the unperturbed, reliable
    ghost life he carried, with no need to invent.
    And high trees round the house, breathed upon
    day and night by winds as slow as a cart
    coming late from market, or the stir
    a fiddle could make in his reluctant heart.
    II
                            That day, we were like one
                            of his troubled couples, speechless
                            until he spoke for them,
                            haunters of silence at noon
                            in a deep lane that was sexual
                            with ferns and butterflies,
                            scared at our hurt,
                            throat-sick, heat-struck, driven
                            into the damp-floored wood

                            where we made an episode
                            of ourselves,