All Poems
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Personal Helicon
© Seamus Justin Heaney
As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.
Request To The Grace
© Robert Herrick
Ponder my words, if so that any be
Known guilty here of incivility;
Act of Union
© Seamus Justin Heaney
ITo-night, 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.
My Little Doll
© Charles Kingsley
I once had a sweet little doll, dears,
The prettiest doll in the world;
The Tollund Man
© Seamus Justin Heaney
Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.
My Romance
© Madison Julius Cawein
If it so befalls that the midnight hovers
In mist no moonlight breaks,
The leagues of the years my spirit covers,
And my self myself forsakes.
The Grauballe Man
© Seamus Justin Heaney
As if he had been poured
in tar, he lies
on a pillow of turf
and seems to weep
Limbo
© Seamus Justin Heaney
Fishermen at Ballyshannon
Netted an infant last night
Along with the salmon.
An illegitimate spawning,
Requiem for the Croppies
© Seamus Justin Heaney
The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley...
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp...
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.
Dream Song 224: Lonely in his great age
© John Berryman
Lonely in his great age, Henry's old friend
leaned on his burning cane while hís old friend
was hymnéd out of living.
The Abbey rang with sound. Pound white as snow
bowed to them with his thoughtsit's hard to know them though
for the old man sang no word.
Strange Fruit
© Seamus Justin Heaney
Here is the girl's head like an exhumed gourd.
Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth.They unswaddled the wet fern of her hair
And made an exhibition of its coil,
Let the air at her leathery beauty.
Motherhood
© Edgar Albert Guest
I wonder if he'll stop to think,
When the long years have traveled by,
The Early Purges
© Seamus Justin Heaney
I was six when I first saw kittens drown.
Dan Taggart pitched them, 'the scraggy wee shits',
Into a bucket; a frail metal sound,
Death Of A Naturalist
© Seamus Justin Heaney
All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Follower
© Seamus Justin Heaney
My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horse strained at his clicking tongue.
How I Consulted The Oracle Of The Goldfishes
© James Russell Lowell
What know we of the world immense
Beyond the narrow ring of sense?
Blackberry-Picking
© Seamus Justin Heaney
Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
