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 sh.o.r.e 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 c.o.c.ked 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 p.r.o.ng 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 una.s.sailed 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 a.n.a.lyses 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 hoa.r.s.e.
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 d.y.k.es 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 pa.s.sword, 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 deja-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 G.o.d, 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 c.o.c.ked 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 b.u.t.toned flap, the braid cord Looped into the revolver b.u.t.t.
"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 a.s.sumed 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.