In Memory of Seamus Heaney:
Reef the sails. Batten down.
Wind-tipped, then wind-drunk
up went the sails into a fine billow
my crow’s nest of a life
in full world-tilt
as the rolling waves carried us out
past the flat clean sandbars, with their shoals
and eddies of tiny silver fish darting about.
Where to?" I asked
and the Captain replied “Anywhere is fine”
so we headed West, deep water
almost obsidian black now, surface-hard,
whose unfathomable depths
summoned an unseen underworld.
I couldn’t gaze upon that;
it felt like the very darkest reaches,
like the day my brother died
so I looked out and beyond
as the setting sun bathed the sky
in washes of soft color:
“open now as the eye of heaven,”
and the world became gentle again.
Published in A New Ulster
