Read an Excerpt
from Glanmore Revisited
I Scrabble
in memoriam Tom Delaney, archaeologist
Bare flags. Pump water. Winter-evening cold.
Our backs might never warm up but our faces
Burned from the hearth-blaze and the hot whiskeys.
It felt remembered even then, an old
Rightness half-imagined or foretold,
As green sticks hissed and spat into the ashes
And whatever rampaged out there couldn’t reach us,
Firelit, shuttered, slated and stone-walled.
Year after year, our game of Scrabble: love
Taken for granted like any other word
That was chanced on and allowed within the rules.
So ‘scrabble’ let it be. Intransitive.
Meaning to scratch or rake at something hard.
Which is what he hears. Our scraping, clinking tools.
II The Cot
Scythe and axe and hedge-clippers, the shriek
Of the gate the children used to swing on,
Poker, scuttle, tongs, a gravel rake –
The old activity starts up again
But starts up differently. We’re on our own
Years later in the same locus amoenus,
Tenants no longer, but in full possession
Of an emptied house and whatever keeps between us.
Which must be more than keepsakes, even though
The child’s cot’s back in place where Catherine
Woke in the dawn and answered doodle doo
To the rooster in the farm across the road –
And is the same cot I myself slept in
When the whole world was a farm that eked and crowed.
Copyright © 2014 by The Estate of Seamus Heaney
