 Felly, gweithio, wrth gwaeth, dyfodol, mae Llywodraeth, gyda'r dyfodol yn dda, ac mae'r dyfodol yn dyfodol yma. O'n dweud hon i chi arbyn ni, o'r dyfodol. Fy enw i'n gweithio'r Llywodraeth, oherwydd mae'n gweithio'r Llywodraeth yn gweithio gael dda, a'n gwneud o'r ddigonio'r meddwl yn ei gael arbennig, oherwydd mae'r eich ddweud yn 2011. We're particularly delighted to be here on National Poetry Day, the only one day celebration of poetry that involves the whole country, including a huge number of schools in reading, writing and reciting poetry. I also want to thank Sheamus Heaney Estate and Favourite Books for granting us permission for the readings here this evening in tribute to Sheamus Heaney in this, the 10th anniversary year of his death. Catherine Healy will take the stage shortly to talk about her father's life, work and legacy. Before I hand over to her, I just wanted to say a few words that Josephine Hart wrote on the basic purpose of her poetry hours. She thought a public performance of the great poetry of the dead poets read by great actors should be the norm in London. Her philosophy can be simply expressed in three parts. First, the life of the poet. Josephine agreed with T.S. Eliot that we understand the work better if we understand something of the poet's life. As Eliot said, the poet always writes out of his personal life in his finest work out of its tragedy, whatever it may be, remorse, lost love. All of her introductions to the great poets are published by Viralgo in life-saving, words that burn and catching life by the throat. And they're also available on our free app and on the website. Her second point was that the poets read aloud. She believed poetry startles us into a more full sense of life and that it is a trinity of sound sense and sensibility. And that the sense of sound and what Robert Frost called the sound of sense will be lost unless we hear it. Language caught alive. The gold in the ore is the sound. Yates in his seventies said he'd spent his life clearing out of poetry every phrase written for the eye alone and bringing all back to syntax, that is, for the ear. Ordon put it more bluntly, no poem which is not better heard than read is good poetry. Josephine was fond of quoting Seamus Heaney, who has an undergraduate at Queens, found that on hearing Eliot's four quartets read by the actor Robert Spate, what had been perplexing when sight read for meaning only was hypnotic when read aloud. I'm going to hand over to his daughter Catherine Heaney now and she'll talk to you for five, ten minutes, something like that, and then the actors will join us. Thank you for that lovely welcome, Siobhan, and good evening everyone. It's my pleasure and privilege to be here with you this evening on this National Poetry Day to celebrate my father's work and to mark the tenth anniversary of his death with this special edition of the Poetry Hour. One of the first times I was ever in the British Library was in 2001, not long after I moved to London, and I came here with my father to hear him speak at an event for the Poetry Archive, which had been recently launched by the then Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion. As I'm sure some of you here know, the Poetry Archive preserves recordings of poets reading their own work, and in the course of his speech, Dad entertained the assembled company with impressions of a few of his favourite poets, including Robert Lowell and the Scottish poet, Sorley MacLean. It was a brilliant, funny speech. Dad was a great mimic, but more importantly, he made a serious and characteristically eloquent case for hearing poetry read aloud. As a poet, he understood how the spoken voice could amplify and reveal the cadences and rhythms within a poem, and how that in turn deepens the listener's understanding of delight in the work. This is something that Josephine Hart also passionately believed, and that lies at the heart of these Poetry Hour events. My father greatly admired Josephine and her boundless energy and efforts to bring poetry to new audiences through her remarkable evenings. Work that her husband, Morisachi, continues to support through the Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation. Dad read at two of the London Poetry Hours, including a celebration of Yates at the Irish Embassy in 2013, not long before he died, where he read alongside Edna O'Brien and Fiona Shaw. It was a wonderful event, but I do think it took all of Dad's unflappability not to be intimidated by the combined regal star power. It's a particularly great honour for me to be here this evening hearing his poems read in this hallowed institution on a day that is all about celebrating poetry. I'd like to take the opportunity to salute the team at National Poetry Day and the Forward Arts Foundation for making this such an important date in the cultural calendar and for their work in championing the vital place of poetry in our work. I think everyone would agree that this year's theme of refuge couldn't be more timely. Of course, special thanks to Siobhan, our director tonight who's put together a really special programme. I cannot and I would not dare attempt to recreate one of Josephine's legendary introductions, but as I'm guessing most of you here know, Seamus Heaney was a poet, translator, critic, teacher and playwright, whose debut Death of a Naturalist appeared in 1966, the first of 12 volumes of original poetry. Its success marked the beginning of a career that would see his work reach a worldwide audience, win many prizes and that kept him heroically busy until his death in 2013. Since then, our family, working closely with Faber, his publisher of Over Five Decades, have continued to bring the work to new readers in a series of landmark volumes. The translations of Seamus Heaney, edited by Marcus Sonzoni, came out last year to critical acclaim and brings together all of my father's translations of other poets and which really reflects his broad engagement with work from across centuries and continents, from Virgil to Beowulf to Joseph Brodsky. And I'm delighted to say that today marks the publication of the letters of Seamus Heaney, so it feels very auspicious to be here with you all, edited by Christopher Reed, who is himself a poet and former Faber poetry editor. This wide-ranging and generous selection of correspondence is the result of years of digging and research by Christopher in public and private archives. I know there are a few people in the audience who know how many letters Dad wrote and what a Herculean task that must have been, but this volume shows a more intimate, less guarded side of him. Thoughtful, confiding, sometimes joking, sometimes frustrated, often in transit. Here's the start of one written to his friend Bernard O'Donoghue from an Amtrak train hurtling from Boston to New York in 1990. Dear Bernard, the shaky nature of the calligraphy is truly due to the moving train, great symbol of the continent and all that, and not the kind of Budweiser that shimmers to my left. For me, reading these letters is like hearing his voice again with all its warmth and empathy, playfulness and joy in language. But they're also a testament to his unwavering sense of duty and his generous support of friends and fellow poets. But to return to tonight, most of the poems you will hear come from 100 poems, a selection chosen by my mother Mary, my brothers Michael and Christopher and me in 2018. It spans Dad's entire career from the first book to the last, and it's very much a personal selection, poems that carry special resonance for us and hold memories of family life. But we were also careful to include the ones that were among his favourite to read, poems like Moss Bond's Sunlight, Clearance's Three and St Kevin and the Blackbird. And tonight we are extraordinarily lucky to have them read for us by four gifted actors, Breed Brennan, Ruth Nega, Des McElear and Edward McLean. They will be reading some early pastoral lyrics evoking the rural county dairy of my father's upbringing, as well as the darker and flinching poems of his mid-career that confronted the violence of the Troubles. But you will also hear many of his most beloved poems, including a number written for his family, that in the words of his beloved poem, Post Script, Catch the Heart, Off Guard and Blow it Open. I would also like to say it's particularly special to have Des and Ruth here tonight as, respectively, they played Philoctetes and Antigone in the original productions of the Curitroy and the Burial at Thebes, Dad's versions of Two Sophocles plays, and they will be reading speeches from the plays this evening. Finally, I would say that if I've learned one thing over the last ten years, well I've learned a few, but one of them is that if poetry springs from one voice, it lives on through others, and that's what we're celebrating here tonight. So my thanks once again to our brilliant readers, to the Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation, National Poetry Day, the British Library and to all of you for coming. Enjoy the evening. I will just take a moment to introduce our brilliant actors, and again, Josephine Hart agrees with TS Eliot when he said, poetry should be read to us by skilled readers, the feeling for syllable and rhythm penetrating far below the conscious level of thought and feeling, invigorating every word. So first, we have Breed Brennan, who is a Tony and Ifto award-winning actress with multiple Olivier award nominations. She has worked at the Abbey Theatre Dublin, the National Theatre and the RSC here, and among her best-known films are Brooklyn and Dancing at Lounaiser. It would take all night to go through her. Thank you for being here. Then we have Edward McLean. Edward hails from Cork and lives in London, where he trained at Rada. He had a Ifto award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for Run and Jump, opposite Maxine Peak. He's known for his versatility and works widely in independent film, TV theatre and as a voice-over actor. Ruth Negger played Antigone. In the Irish premiere of Seamus Heaney's The Burial at Thieves at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 2004, her more recent credits include Lady Macbeth opposite Daniel Craig in Macbeth on Broadway and films Passing and Loving and the TV drama series Agents of Shield and Preacher. I'm going to hand over now after I tell you a little bit about Dez McLear. Dez is originally from Belfast and he played Philoptides in Heaney's The Cure at Troy. He appeared in the Ferryman at the Royal Court and the West End. At the National Theatre he was in David Hear's Trilogy of Plays by Chekhov, Ivanov, Platonov and the Seagull. He's also worked at the RSC in several productions with the late Sir Michael Boyd and with Rupert Goode. I am now handing over for the music of what happens. Thank you. You didn't even know about it. Liam Neeson sent me a video this morning so we're going to play that first and then it's a short reading and I should have told the actors. I'm sorry. So from the back, if you wouldn't mind, we have digging. A small town to north of Ireland about 15 miles from Belachie, Chekhov's Heaney's own place. The power of this portrait inspired me with a lifetime love of language that led to my career as an actor. So I'd like to share a reading of digging with you on this special occasion. Digging. Between my finger and my thumb the squat Ben rests snug as a gun. Under my window a clean rasping sound when the spade sinks into gravelly ground. My father digging. I looked down to the straining rump among the floor beds Ben's Low coming up 20 years away, stooping in rhythm through potato drills where he was digging. The coarse boot nestled on the lug. The shaft against the inside knee was levered firmly. He rooted out tall tops buried the bright age deep to scatter new potatoes that we picked loving their cool hardness in her hands. By God, the old man could handle us be it just like his old man. My grandfather cut more turf in a day than any other man on Torners bog. Once I carried a milk in a bottle, curled sloppily with paper, he straightened up to drink it. Then fell too right away, nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods over his shoulder going down and down for the good turf. Digging. The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an age through living roots awaken in my head. But I've no spade to follow man like them. Between my finger and my thumb, the squat pan rests. I'll dig with it. Anna Horish. My place of clear water, the first hill in the world, where springs washed into the shiny grass and darkened cobbles in the bed of the lane. Anna Horish. Soft gradient of consonant, vowel meadow. After image of lamps swung through the yards on winter evenings. With pales and barrels, those mind dwellers go waste deep in mist to break the light ice at wells and dungills. Twice shy, her scarf ala bardo enswade flats for the walk. She came with me one evening for air and friendly talk. We crossed the quiet river, took the embankment walk. Traffic holding its breath, sky a tense diaphragm, dusk hung like a backcloth that shook where a swan swam, tremulous as a hawk hanging deadly. Calm, a vacuum of need collapsed each haunting heart, but tremulously we held as hawk and prey apart. Preserved classic decorum, deployed our talk with art. Our juvenalia had taught us both to wait, not to publish feeling and to regret it all too late. Mushroom loves already had puffed and burst in hate. So, cherry and excited, as a thrush linked on a hawk, we thrilled to the March twilight with nervous childish talk, still waters running deep along the embankment walk. Scaffolding, masons when they start upon a building are careful to test out the scaffolding. Make sure that the planks won't slip at busy points. Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints. And yet, all this comes down when the job's done, showing off walls of sure and solid stone. So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be bridges breaking between you and me, never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall, confident that we have built our wall. From lightnings, eight, the annals say, when the monks of Clon Magnoise were all at prayers inside the oratory, a ship appeared above them in the air. The anchor dragged along behind so deep it hooked itself into the altar rails. And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill, a crewman shinned and grappled down the rope and struggled to release it. But that man can't bear our life here and will drown, the abbot said, unless we help him. So they did. The freed ship sailed. And the man climbed back out of the marvellous, as he had known it. The strand at Loch Beg, in memory of Colin McCartney. All round this little island on the strand far down below there where the break breakers drive. Grow the tall rushes from the oozy sand. Dante, Purgatorio 1. Leaving the white glow of filling stations and a few lonely streetlamps among fields, you climbed the hills toward Newton Hamilton past the Fuse Forest, out beneath the stars. Along the road, a high bear pilgrim's track, where Sweeney fled before the bloodied heads, goatbeards and dog's eyes in a demon pack blazing out of the ground, snapping and squealing. What blazed ahead of you? A faked roadblock? The red lamp swung, the sudden breaks and stalling engine, voices heads hooded and the cold-nosed gun? Or in your driving mirror, tailing headlights that pulled out suddenly and flagged you down, where you weren't knowing and far from what you knew? The lowland clays and waters of Loch Beg, church island spire, its soft treeline of you. There you once heard guns fired behind the house long before rising time, when duck shooters haunted the marigolds and bull rushes, but still were scared to find spent cartridges, acrid, grassy, genital, ejected on your way across the strand to fetch the cause. For you and yours and yours and mine fought shy, spoke an old language of conspirators and could not crack the whip or seize the day. Big voiced scullions, herders, feelers round haycocks and hind quarters, talkers and buyers, slow arbitrators of the burial ground. Across that strand of ours the cattle graze up to their bellies in an early mist and now they turn their unbewildered gaze to where we work our way through squeaking sedge, drowning in dew. Like a dull blade with its edge honed bright, Loch Beg half shines under the haze. I turn because the sweeping of your feet has stopped behind me to find you on your knees with blood and roadside muck in your hair and eyes. Then kneel in front of you in brimming grass and gather up cold handfuls of the dew to wash you cousin. I dab you clean with moss, find the drizzle out of a low clod. I lift you under the arms and lay you flat. With rushes that shoot green again, I plat green scapulars to wear over your shroud. The underground. There we were in the vaulted tunnel running. You and your going away coat speeding ahead and me. Me then like a fleet god gaining upon you before you turned to a reed or some new white flower japped with crimson as the coat flapped wild and button after button sprang off and fell in a trail between the underground and the Albert Hall. Honeymooning. Mooning around late for the proms. Our echoes die in that corridor and now. I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones retracing the path back, lifting the buttons to end up in a drafty lamplit station after the trains have gone. The wet track, bared and tensed as I am. All attention for your step following and damned if I look back. The peninsula. When you have nothing more to say, just drive for a day all around the peninsula. The sky is tall as over a runway. The land without marks. So you will not arrive but pass through the always skirting landfall. At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill. The plowed field swallows the whitewashed gable and you're in the dark again. Now recall the glazed foreshore and silhouetted log. That rock where breakers shredded into rags. The leggy birds stilted on their own legs. Islands riding themselves out into the fog and then drive back home, still with nothing to say. Except that now you will encode all landscapes by this. Things founded clean on their own shapes, water and ground in their extremity. Clearances for fear of affectation made her affect inadequacy whenever it came to pronouncing words beyond her. Bertol Brech. She had managed something hampered and askew every time as if she might betray the hampered and inadequate by too well-adjusted a vocabulary. More challenge than pride, she'd tell me. You know all damn things. So I governed my tongue in front of her. A genuinely well-adjusted, adequate betrayal of what I knew better. No, and I decently relapsed into the wrong grammar which kept us allied and at bay. Clearances three. When all the others were away at mass, I was all hers as we peeled potatoes. They broke the silence, let fall one by one like solder weeping off the soldering iron. Cold comforts shared between us. Things to share gleaming in a bucket of clean water and again let fall. Little pleasant splashes from each other's work would bring us to our senses. So while the parish priest at her bedside went hammering tongs at the prayers for the dying and some were responding and some crying, I remembered her head bent towards my head. Her breath in mine are fluent dipping knives. Never closer the whole rest of our lives. The clothes shrine. It was a whole new sweetness in the early days when I found light white muslin blouses on a see-through nylon line drip-drying in the bathroom. Or a nylon slip in the shine of its own electricity. As if Saint Bridget once more had rigged up a ray of sun like the one she'd strung on air to dry her own cloak on, a hard-pressed Bridget so unstoppably on the go. The damp and slump and unfair drag of the work day made light of and got through, as usual, brilliantly. The burial at Thieves. The burial at Thieves is many. Creon has made a law. A Theocles has been buried as a soldier with full honours so he's gone home to the dead. But not Polyneses. Polyneses has denied any burial at all. Word has come down from Creon. There's to be no laying to rest, no mourning. And the corpse is to be publicly dishonoured. His body's to be dumped. Disposed of like a carcass. Left out for the birds to feed on. If you so much as throw him the common handful of clay you'll have committed a crime. I will bury him myself. Death come so be it. There'll be a glory in it. I'll go down to the underworld hand in hand with a brother. And I'll go with my head held high so the gods will be proud of me. The land of the living sister is neither here nor there. We enter it and we leave it. The dead in the land of the dead are the ones you'll be with the longest. Call me mad if you like, but leave me alone to do it. Creon. I disobeyed because the law was not the law of use but the law ordained by justice. Justice dwelling deep among the gods of the dead. What they decree is immemorial and binding for us all. The proclamation had your force behind it, but it was a mortal force and I also immortal. I chose to disregard it. I abide by statutes utter and immutable, unwritten, unoriginal God given laws. I never did an over thing than bury my brother Polynesus and if these men weren't so afraid to sound unpatriotic, they'd say the same, but you are king. And because you are king you won't be contradicted. There's no shame in burying a brother. My father's and my mother's son is dead. Religion dictates the burial of the dead. The dead and Hades know who did this deed. Remember this, citizens. I am linked on Hades' arm, taking my last look, my last walk in the light. Soon the sun will go out on a silent, starless shore and Hades will step aside. He will give me to Acheron, Lord of the pitch black lake and that bridegroom's cold hand will take my hand in the dark. I'm like Naiobi. Naiobi turned to stone in the thawing snow and rain, a rock that weeps forever like ivy in a shower, slewcing down the ridge of high Mount Siplos. I am still in life and I dread to leave our groves and springs. Fortunate men of thieves owe my thieves of the chariots farewell. I am going away under my rock-piled roof. Over and over again because I am who I am, I retrace that fatal line and the ghastly love I sprang from. My father weds his mother. He mounts her. Me and mine, his half sisters and brothers, are born in their sullid bed. These are the stricken dead I go to meet in Hades. No flinching, then at fate. Stone of my wedding chamber. Stone of my tomb. Stone of my prison roof and prison floor. Behind you and beyond you stand the dead. They are my people. And they're waiting for me. And when they see me coming down the road, they'll hurry out to meet me, all of them. My father and my mother first. And then iteoclies, my brother. Everyone is dear to me as when I washed and dressed and laid them out. When I did the same for you, when I did what people know in their heart of hearts was right, I was doomed for it. Have I offended the gods? Do the gods have no regard for what I did? Where can I turn if they have turned away? The right observance put me in the wrong. And if that is the gods verdict, so be it, I'll have transgressed and will suffer gladly. But if the wrong was laid upon me wrongly by these unjust ones, then let their penalty be no less than the one they've doomed me to. Now, gods of Thebes, look down. Through my native streets and fields I'm being marched away. And never, you men of Thebes, forget what you saw today. Edipus's daughter, the last of his royal house, condemned, and condemned for what? Practising devotion. For a reverence that was right. A call. Hold on, she said. I'll just run out and get him. The weather here is so good. He took the chance to do a bit of weeding. So I saw him down on his hands and knees beside the leak rig, touching, inspecting, separating one stalk from the other, gently pulling up everything, not tapered, frail, and leafless. Pleased to feel each little weed root break. But rueful also. Then find myself listening to the amplified grave ticking of hall clocks where the phone lay unattended in a calm of mirror glass and sun-struck pendulums. And find myself then thinking, if it were nowadays, this is how death would summon every man. Next thing, he spoke. And I nearly said, I loved him. The wife's tale. When I had spread it all on linen cloth under the hedge, I called them over. The hum and gulp of the thresher ran down and the big belt slewed to a standstill, straw hanging undelivered in the jaws. There was such quiet that I heard their boots reaching the stubble 20 yards away. He lay down and said, give these fellows theirs, I'm in no hurry, plucking grass in handfuls and tossing it in the air. That looks well. He nodded at my white cloth on the grass. I declare a woman can lay out a field, though boys like us have little call for cloths. I thinked, then watched me as I poured a cup and buttered the thick slices that he likes. It's threshing better than I thought, and mind it's good, clean seed, away over there and look. Always this inspection has to be made even when I don't know what to look for. But I ran my hand in the half-filled bags hooked to the slots. As hard as shot, innumerable and cool. The bags gipped where the shoots ran back to the stilled drum, and forks were stuck at angles in the grind as javelins might mark lost battlefields. I moved between them back across the stubble. They lay in the ring of their own crusts and rags, smoking and saying nothing. There's good yield, isn't there? As pride as if he were the land itself. Enough for crushing and sowing both. And that was it. I'd come and he had shown me, so I belonged no further to the work. I gathered cups and folded up the cloth and went. But they still kept their ease, white, unbuttoned, gritful under the trees. Saint Kevin and the Blackbird. And then there was Saint Kevin and the Blackbird. The Saint is kneeling, arms stretched out inside his cell, but the cell is narrow. So, one turned up palm is out the window. Stiff as a crossbeam. When a Blackbird lands and lays in it and settles down to nest, Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked neat head and claws, and finding himself linked into the network of eternal life is moved to pity. Now he must hold his hand like a branch out in the sun and the rain for weeks until the younger hatched and fledged and flown. And since the whole things imagined anyhow, the witch is he. Self-forgetful or in agony all the time, from the neck on out down through his hurting forearms, are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees? Or has the shuttide blank of under-earth crept up through him? Is there distance in his head? Lleon and mirroed clear in love's deep river to labour and not to seek reward, he prays. A prayer his body makes entirely, for he has forgotten self, forgotten bird, and on the riverbank forgotten the river's name. Mosbaw, sunlight, for Mary Heaney. Sunlit absence. The helmet had pumped in the yard, heated its iron, water honeyed in the slung bucket, and the sun stood like a griddle, cooling against the wall of each long afternoon. So her hands scuffled over the bake board. The reddening stove sends its plaque of heat against her where she stood in a flowery apron by the window. Now she dusts the board with a goose's wing. Now sits broad-lapped with whitened nails and measling shins. Here is a space again, the scorn rising to the tick of two clocks. And here is love, like a tinsmith's scoop sunk past its game in the meal bin. Casualty. He would drink by himself and raise a weathered thumb towards the top shelf, calling another rum and black currant without having to raise his voice. Or order a quick stout by a lifting of the eyes and a discreet dumb show of pulling off the top. A closing time would go in waders and peaked cap into the showery dark. A dole kept breadwinner, but a natural for work. I loved his whole manner, sure-footed, but too sly. His deadpan sidling-tacked his fisherman's quick eye and turned observant back. Incomprehensible to him, my other life. Sometimes on his high stool, too busy with his knife at the tobacco plug and not meeting my eye, in a pause after a slug, he mentioned poetry. We would be on our own, and always politic and shy of condescension. I would manage by some trick to switch the talk to ease or lure of horse and cart, or the provisionals. But my tentative art, his turned back watches, too. He was blown to bits, outdrinking in a curfew, others obeyed. Three nights after they shot dead, the thirteen men in dairy. Pares, thirteen, the wall said. Bogside, nill, that Wednesday. Everybody held their breath and trembled. It was a day of cold, raw silence. Windblown surplus and sutein, rained on, flower laden, coffin after coffin, seemed to float from the door of the packed cathedral, like blossoms on slow water. The common funeral unrolled its swaddling band, lapping, tightening, till we were braced and bound, like brothers in a ring. But he would not be held at home by his own crowd. Whatever threats were foamed, whatever black flags waved, I see him as he turned in that bombed, offending place, remorse fused with horror in his still knowable face. His cornered outface stare blinding in the flash. He had gone miles away, for he drank like a fish, nightly. Naturally swimming towards the lure of warm, lit up places, the blurred mesh and murmur drifting among glasses in their gregarious smoke. How culpable was he that last night, when he broke our tribe's complicity. Now, you're supposed to be an educated man, I hear him say. Puzzle me the right answer to that one. I missed his funeral. Those quiet walkers and sideways talkers shoaling out of his lane to the respectable purring of the hearse. They move in equal pace with the habitual slow consolation of a dawdling engine. The line lifted, hand over fist, cold sunshine on the water. The land banks with fog. That morning when he took me in his boat, the screw purling turning indol in fathums white. I tasted freedom with him. To get out early, haul steadily off the bottom, to sprays the catch and smile as you find a rhythm working you, slow mile by mile into your proper haunt. Somewhere well out beyond dawn sniffing revenant, flodder through midnight rain. Question me again. The Blackbird of Glamour. On the grass when I arrive, filling the stillness with life, but ready to scare off at the very first wrong move. In the ivy when I leave. It's you, Blackbird, I love. I park, pause, take heed, breathe. Just breathe and sit and lines I once translated come back. I want away to the house of death, to my father under the low clay roof. And I think of one gone to him, a little stillness dancer. Haunter's son lost brother, cavorting through the yard. So glad to see me home. My home sick first term over. And I think of a neighbor's words, yawn bird on the shed roof up on the ridge for weeks. I said nothing at the time, but I never liked yawn bird. The automatic lock clunks shut. The Blackbird's panic is short lived. For a second I have a bird's eye view of myself, a shadow on raked gravel in front of my house of life. Hedge hop, I am absolute for you. You're ready, talk back. You're each standoffish comeback. You're picky, nervy, gold beak on the grass when I arrive. In the ivy when I leave. A kite from Michael and Christopher. All through that Sunday afternoon, a kite flew above Sunday. A tightened drum head. A flitter of blown chaff. I'd seen it grey and slippy in the making. I'd tapped it when it dried out white and stiff. I'd tied the bows of newspaper along its six foot tail. But now it was far up like a small black lock and now it dragged as if the bellied string were a wet rope hauled upon to lift a shawl. My friend says that the human soul is about the weight of a snipe. Yet the soul had anchored there. The string that sags and ascends weighs like a furrow assumed into the heavens before the kite plunges down into the wood and this line goes useless. Take it in your two hands boys and feel the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief. You have a barn fit for it. Stand in here in front of me and take the strain. At the wellhead, your songs when you sing them with your two eyes closed as you always do are like a local road we've known every turn of in the past. That midge-veiled, high-hedged side road where you stood looking and listening until a car would come and go and leave you lonelier than you had been to begin with. So sing on, dear shut-eyed one, dear far-voiced veteran. Sing yourself to where the singing comes from. Ardent and cut off like our blind neighbour who played the piano all day in her bedroom. Her notes came out to us like hoisted water ravelling off a bucket at the wellhead where next thing we'd be listening, hushed and awkward. That blind from birth, sweet-voiced, withdrawn musician was like a silver vein in heavy clay. Night water glittering in the light of day but also just our neighbour, Rosie Keenan. She touched our cheeks. She let us touch her braille in books like books wallpaper passions came coming. Her hands were active and her eyes were full of open darkness and a watery shine. She knew us by our voices. She'd say she saw whoever or whatever. Being with her was intimate and helpful like a cure you didn't notice happening. When I read a poem with Keenan's well in it she said, I can see the sky at the bottom of it now. The railway children. When we climbed the slopes of the cutting we were eye level with the white cups of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires. Like lovely freehand they curved for miles east and miles west beyond us sagging under their burden of swallows. We were small and thought we knew nothing worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires the shiny pouches of raindrops each one seated full with the light of the sky the gleam of the lines and ourselves so infinitesimally scaled we could stream through the eye of a needle. A hazel stick for Catherine Anne. The living mother of pearl of a salmon just out of the water is gone just like that but your stick is kept salmon silver. Seasoned and bendy it convinces the hand that what you have you hold to play with and pose with and lay about with but then too it points back to cattle and spatter and beating the bars of a gate the very stick we might cut from our family the living cobalt of an afternoon dragonfly drew my eye to it first and the evening I trimmed it for you you saw your first glow worm all of us stood round in silence even you gigantic enough to darken the sky for a glow and when I poked open the grass tiny brightening den lit the eye in the blunt paired end of your stick. Post script and some time make the time to drive out west into County Clare along the flaggy shore in September or October and the wind and the light are working off each other so that the ocean on one side is wild with foam and glitter and inland among stones the surface of a slate grey lake is lit by the earthed lightning of a flock of swans. Their feathers roughed and ruffling white on white their fully grown headstrong looking heads tucked or cresting or busy underwater useless to think you'll park and capture it more thoroughly you are neither here nor there a hurry through which known and strange towns pass as big soft buffishings come at the car sideways and catch the heart off guard and blow it open. From the cure at Troy human beings suffer they torture one another they get hurt and get hard no poem or play or song can fully write a wrong inflicted and endured history says don't hope this side of the grave but then once in a lifetime the longed fore tidal wave of justice can rise up and hope and history rhyme so hope for a great sea change on the far side of revenge believe that a father shore is reachable from here believe in miracles and cures and healing wells call miracle self-healing the double take the utter self-revealing double take of feeling if there is fire on the mountain and lightning and storm and a God speaks from the sky