| Author | Message | ||
     Stuart Wilson Member Username: Stuart Post Number: 879 Registered: 10-2006 |
The only modern poet I have almost everything by, and at 74 too young to even leave us with "late Heaney". Unlike many of his contemporaries, highly accessible,brilliantly readable, genuinely beautiful, never tricksy for the sake of it, able to appeal both to the man in the street and the academic. One of my favourites: The Harvest Bow As you plaited the harvest bow You implicated the mellowed silence in you In wheat that does not rust But brightens as it tightens twist by twist Into a knowable corona, A throwaway love-knot of straw. Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of game cocks Harked to their gift and worked with fine intent Until your fingers moved somnambulant: I tell and finger it like braille, Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable, And if I spy into its golden loops I see us walk between the railway slopes Into an evening of long grass and midges, Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges, An auction notice on an outhouse wall— You with a harvest bow in your lapel, Me with the fishing rod, already homesick For the big lift of these evenings, as your stick Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes Nothing: that original townland Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand. The end of art is peace Could be the motto of this frail device That I have pinned up on our deal dresser— Like a drawn snare Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm. | ||
| Pádraig Collins Member Username: Pádraig_collins Post Number: 6011 Registered: 05-2005 |
Thanks for posting that beautiful poem Stuart. RIP Seamus. |