Y EL ÓBOLO BAJO LA LENGUA

 

THE SINGER'S HOUSE

 

To David Hammond

 

People here used to believe

that drowned souls lived in seals.

At spring tides they might change shape.

They loved music and swam in for a singer

 

who might stand at the end of summer

in the mouth of a whitewashed turf-shed,

his shoulder to the jamb, his song

a rowboat far out in evening.

 

When I came here first you were always singing,

a hint of the clip of the pick

in your winnowing climb and attack.

Raise it again, man. We still believe what we hear.

 

Seamus Heaney.

Y EL ÓBOLO BAJO LA LENGUA

FOLLOWER

 

My father worked with a horse-plough,

His shoulders gloved like a full sail strung

Between the shafts and the furrow.

The horses strained at his clicking tongue.

An expert. He would set the wing

And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.

The sod rolled over without breaking.

At the headrig, with a single pluck

Of reins, the sweating team turned round

And back into the land. His eye

Narrowed and angled at the ground,

Mapping the furrow exactly.

I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake,

Fell sometimes on the polished sod;

Sometimes he rode me on his back

Dipping and rising to his plod.

I wanted to grow up and plough,

To close one eye, stiffen my arm.

All I ever did was follow

In his broad shadow round the farm.

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,

Yapping always. But today

It is my father who keeps stumbling

Behind me, and will not go away.

Seamus Heaney.

Y EL ÓBOLO BAJO LA LENGUA

ALPHABETS

A shadow his father makes with joined hands

And thumbs and fingers nibbles on the wall

Like a rabbit`s head. He understands

He wil understan more when he goes to school.

There he draws somke with chalk the whole firts week,

Then draws the forked stick that they call a Y.

This is writing. A swan`s neck and swan`s back

Man the 2 he can see now as well as say.

Two rafters and a cross-tie on the slate

Are the letter some call ah, some call ay.

Ther are charts, there are headlines, there is a right

Way to hold the pen and a wrong way.

Firts it is “copying out”, and then “English”

Marked correct with a little leaning hoe.

Smells of inkwells rise in the classroom hush.

A goobe in the window tilts like a coloured O.

Seamus Heaney.

Y EL ÓBOLO BAJO LA LENGUA

THE WISHING TREE

I thought of her as the wishing tree that died

And saw it lifted, root and branch, to heaven,

Trailing a shower of all that had been driven

Need by need by need into its hale

Sap-wood and bark: coin and pin and nail

Came streaming from it like a comet-tail

New-minted and dissolved. I had a visión

Of an airy branch-head rising through damp cloud,

Of turned-up faces where the tree han stood.

Seamus Heaney.