Opened Ground Read online

opening at my feet

  like a shed skin,

  the shaft wettish

  as I sank it upright

  and beginning to

  steam in the sun.

  And now they have twinned

  that obelisk:

  among the stones,

  under a bearded cairn

  a love-nest is disturbed,

  catkin and bog-cotton tremble

  as they raise up

  the cloven oak-limb.

  I stand at the edge of centuries

  facing a goddess.

  IV

  This centre holds

  and spreads,

  sump and seedbed,

  a bag of waters

  and a melting grave.

  The mothers of autumn

  sour and sink,

  ferments of husk and leaf

  deepen their ochres.

  Mosses come to a head,

  heather unseeds,

  brackens deposit

  their bronze.

  This is the vowel of earth

  dreaming its root

  in flowers and snow,

  mutation of weathers

  and seasons,

  a windfall composing

  the floor it rots into.

  I grew out of all this

  like a weeping willow

  inclined to

  the appetites of gravity.

  V

  The hand-carved felloes

  of the turf-cart wheels

  buried in a litter

  of turf mould,

  the cupid’s bow

  of the tail-board,

  the socketed lips

  of the cribs:

  I deified the man

  who rode there,

  god of the waggon,

  the hearth-feeder.

  I was his privileged

  attendant, a bearer

  of bread and drink,

  the squire of his circuits.

  When summer died

  and wives forsook the fields

  we were abroad,

  saluted, given right-of-way.

  Watch our progress

  down the haw-lit hedges,

  my manly pride

  when he speaks to me.

  VI

  And you, Tacitus,

  observe how I make my grove

  on an old crannog

  piled by the fearful dead:

  a desolate peace.

  Our mother ground

  is sour with the blood

  of her faithful,

  they lie gargling

  in her sacred heart

  as the legions stare

  from the ramparts.

  Come back to this

  ‘island of the ocean’

  where nothing will suffice.

  Read the inhumed faces

  of casualty and victim;

  report us fairly,

  how we slaughter

  for the common good

  and shave the heads

  of the notorious,

  how the goddess swallows

  our love and terror.

  Act of Union

  I

  Tonight, a first movement, a pulse,

  As if the rain in bogland gathered head

  To slip and flood: a bog-burst,

  A gash breaking open the ferny bed.

  Your back is a firm line of eastern coast

  And arms and legs are thrown

  Beyond your gradual hills. I caress

  The heaving province where our past has grown.

  I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder

  That you would neither cajole nor ignore.

  Conquest is a lie. I grow older

  Conceding your half-independent shore

  Within whose borders now my legacy

  Culminates inexorably.

  II

  And I am still imperially

  Male, leaving you with the pain,

  The rending process in the colony,

  The battering ram, the boom burst from within.

  The act sprouted an obstinate fifth column

  Whose stance is growing unilateral.

  His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum

  Mustering force. His parasitical

  And ignorant little fists already

  Beat at your borders and I know they’re cocked

  At me across the water. No treaty

  I foresee will salve completely your tracked

  And stretchmarked body, the big pain

  That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again.

  Hercules and Antaeus

  Sky-born and royal,

  snake-choker, dung-heaver,

  his mind big with golden apples,

  his future hung with trophies,

  Hercules has the measure

  of resistance and black powers

  feeding off the territory.

  Antaeus, the mould-hugger,

  is weaned at last:

  a fall was a renewal

  but now he is raised up –

  the challenger’s intelligence

  is a spur of light,

  a blue prong graiping him

  out of his element

  into a dream of loss

  and origins – the cradling dark,

  the river-veins, the secret gullies

  of his strength,

  the hatching grounds

  of cave and souterrain,

  he has bequeathed it all

  to elegists. Balor will die

  and Byrthnoth and Sitting Bull.

  Hercules lifts his arms

  in a remorseless V,

  his triumph unassailed

  by the powers he has shaken,

  and lifts and banks Antaeus

  high as a profiled ridge,

  a sleeping giant,

  pap for the dispossessed.

  from Whatever You Say Say Nothing

  I

  I’m writing this just after an encounter

  With an English journalist in search of ‘views

  On the Irish thing’. I’m back in winter

  Quarters where bad news is no longer news,

  Where media-men and stringers sniff and point,

  Where zoom lenses, recorders and coiled leads

  Litter the hotels. The times are out of joint

  But I incline as much to rosary beads

  As to the jottings and analyses

  Of politicians and newspapermen

  Who’ve scribbled down the long campaign from gas

  And protest to gelignite and Sten,

  Who proved upon their pulses ‘escalate’,

  ‘Backlash’ and ‘crack down’, ‘the provisional wing’,

  ‘Polarization’ and ‘long-standing hate’.

  Yet I live here, I live here too, I sing,

  Expertly civil-tongued with civil neighbours

  On the high wires of first wireless reports,

  Sucking the fake taste, the stony flavours

  Of those sanctioned, old, elaborate retorts:

  ‘Oh, it’s disgraceful, surely, I agree.’

  ‘Where’s it going to end?’ ‘It’s getting worse.’

  ‘They’re murderers.’ ‘Internment, understandably …’

  The ‘voice of sanity’ is getting hoarse.

  III

  ‘Religion’s never mentioned here,’ of course.

  ‘You know them by their eyes,’ and hold your tongue.

  ‘One side’s as bad as the other,’ never worse.

  Christ, it’s near time that some small leak was sprung

  In the great dykes the Dutchman made

  To dam the dangerous tide that followed Seamus.

  Yet for all this art and sedentary trade

  I am incapable. The famous

  Northern reticence, the tight gag of place

  And times: yes, yes. Of the ‘wee six’ I sing

  Where to be saved you only must save
face

  And whatever you say, you say nothing.

  Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us:

  Manoeuvrings to find out name and school,

  Subtle discrimination by addresses

  With hardly an exception to the rule

  That Norman, Ken and Sidney signalled Prod

  And Seamus (call me Sean) was sure-fire Pape.

  O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,

  Of open minds as open as a trap,

  Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks,

  Where half of us, as in a wooden horse,

  Were cabin’d and confined like wily Greeks,

  Besieged within the siege, whispering morse.

  IV

  This morning from a dewy motorway

  I saw the new camp for the internees:

  A bomb had left a crater of fresh clay

  In the roadside, and over in the trees

  Machine-gun posts defined a real stockade.

  There was that white mist you get on a low ground

  And it was déjà-vu, some film made

  Of Stalag 17, a bad dream with no sound.

  Is there a life before death? That’s chalked up

  In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,

  Coherent miseries, a bite and sup:

  We hug our little destiny again.

  Singing School

  Fair seedtime had my soul, and I grew up

  Fostered alike by beauty and by fear;

  Much favoured in my birthplace, and no less

  In that beloved Vale to which, erelong,

  I was transplanted …

  William Wordsworth, The Prelude

  He [the stable-boy] had a book of Orange rhymes, and the days when we read them together in the hay-loft gave me the pleasure of rhyme for the first time. Later on I can remember being told, when there was a rumour of a Fenian rising, that rifles were being handed out to the Orangemen; and presently, when I began to dream of my future life, I thought I would like to die fighting the Fenians.

  W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies

  1 The Ministry of Fear

  for Seamus Deane

  Well, as Kavanagh said, we have lived

  In important places. The lonely scarp

  Of St Columb’s College, where I billeted

  For six years, overlooked your Bogside.

  I gazed into new worlds: the inflamed throat

  Of Brandywell, its floodlit dogtrack,

  The throttle of the hare. In the first week

  I was so homesick I couldn’t even eat

  The biscuits left to sweeten my exile.

  I threw them over the fence one night

  In September 1951

  When the lights of houses in the Lecky Road

  Were amber in the fog. It was an act

  Of stealth.

  Then Belfast, and then Berkeley.

  Here’s two on’s are sophisticated,

  Dabbling in verses till they have become

  A life: from bulky envelopes arriving

  In vacation time to slim volumes

  Despatched ‘with the author’s compliments’.

  Those poems in longhand, ripped from the wire spine

  Of your exercise book, bewildered me –

  Vowels and ideas bandied free

  As the seed-pods blowing off our sycamores.

  I tried to write about the sycamores

  And innovated a South Derry rhyme

  With hushed and lulled full chimes for pushed and pulled.

  Those hobnailed boots from beyond the mountain

  Were walking, by God, all over the fine

  Lawns of elocution.

  Have our accents

  Changed? ‘Catholics, in general, don’t speak

  As well as students from the Protestant schools.’

  Remember that stuff? Inferiority

  Complexes, stuff that dreams were made on.

  ‘What’s your name, Heaney?’

  ‘Heaney, Father.’

  ‘Fair

  Enough.’

  On my first day, the leather strap

  Went epileptic in the Big Study,

  Its echoes plashing over our bowed heads,

  But I still wrote home that a boarder’s life

  Was not so bad, shying as usual.

  On long vacations, then, I came to life

  In the kissing seat of an Austin 16

  Parked at a gable, the engine running,

  My fingers tight as ivy on her shoulders,

  A light left burning for her in the kitchen.

  And heading back for home, the summer’s

  Freedom dwindling night by night, the air

  All moonlight and a scent of hay, policemen

  Swung their crimson flashlamps, crowding round

  The car like black cattle, snuffing and pointing

  The muzzle of a Sten gun in my eye:

  ‘What’s your name, driver?’

  ‘Seamus …’

  Seamus?

  They once read my letters at a roadblock

  And shone their torches on your hieroglyphics,

  ‘Svelte dictions’ in a very florid hand.

  Ulster was British, but with no rights on

  The English lyric: all around us, though

  We hadn’t named it, the ministry of fear.

  2 A Constable Calls

  His bicycle stood at the window-sill,

  The rubber cowl of a mud-splasher

  Skirting the front mudguard,

  Its fat black handlegrips

  Heating in sunlight, the ‘spud’

  Of the dynamo gleaming and cocked back,

  The pedal treads hanging relieved

  Of the boot of the law.

  His cap was upside down

  On the floor, next his chair.

  The line of its pressure ran like a bevel

  In his slightly sweating hair.

  He had unstrapped

  The heavy ledger, and my father

  Was making tillage returns

  In acres, roods, and perches.

  Arithmetic and fear.

  I sat staring at the polished holster

  With its buttoned flap, the braid cord

  Looped into the revolver butt.

  ‘Any other root crops?

  Mangolds? Marrowstems? Anything like that?’

  ‘No.’ But was there not a line

  Of turnips where the seed ran out

  In the potato field? I assumed

  Small guilts and sat

  Imagining the black hole in the barracks.

  He stood up, shifted the baton-case

  Further round on his belt,

  Closed the domesday book,

  Fitted his cap back with two hands,

  And looked at me as he said goodbye.

  A shadow bobbed in the window.

  He was snapping the carrier spring

  Over the ledger. His boot pushed off

  And the bicycle ticked, ticked, ticked.

  3 Orange Drums, Tyrone, 1966

  The lambeg balloons at his belly, weighs

  Him back on his haunches, lodging thunder

  Grossly there between his chin and his knees.

  He is raised up by what he buckles under.

  Each arm extended by a seasoned rod,

  He parades behind it. And though the drummers

  Are granted passage through the nodding crowd,

  It is the drums preside, like giant tumours.

  To every cocked ear, expert in its greed,

  His battered signature subscribes ‘No Pope’.

  The goatskin’s sometimes plastered with his blood.

  The air is pounding like a stethoscope.

  4 Summer 1969

  While the Constabulary covered the mob

  Firing into the Falls, I was suffering

  Only the bullying sun of Madrid.

  Each afternoon, in the casserole heat
<
br />   Of the flat, as I sweated my way through

  The life of Joyce, stinks from the fishmarket

  Rose like the reek off a flax-dam.

  At night on the balcony, gules of wine,

  A sense of children in their dark corners,

  Old women in black shawls near open windows,

  The air a canyon rivering in Spanish.

  We talked our way home over starlit plains

  Where patent leather of the Guardia Civil

  Gleamed like fish-bellies in flax-poisoned waters.

  ‘Go back,’ one said, ‘try to touch the people.’

  Another conjured Lorca from his hill.

  We sat through death-counts and bullfight reports

  On the television, celebrities

  Arrived from where the real thing still happened.

  I retreated to the cool of the Prado.

  Goya’s ‘Shootings of the Third of May’

  Covered a wall – the thrown-up arms

  And spasm of the rebel, the helmeted

  And knapsacked military, the efficient

  Rake of the fusillade. In the next room,

  His nightmares, grafted to the palace wall –

  Dark cyclones, hosting, breaking; Saturn

  Jewelled in the blood of his own children,

  Gigantic Chaos turning his brute hips

  Over the world. Also, that holmgang

  Where two berserks club each other to death

  For honour’s sake, greaved in a bog, and sinking.

  He painted with his fists and elbows, flourished

  The stained cape of his heart as history charged.

  5 Fosterage