Seamus Heaney, 3 Poems from “Squarings”

Squarings #2
Roof it again. Batten down. Dig in.
Drink out of tin. Know the scullery cold,
A latch, a door-bar, forged tongs and a grate.

Touch the cross-beam, drive iron in a wall,
Hang a line to verify the plumb
From lintel, coping-stone and chimney-breast.

Relocate the bedrock in the threshold.
Take squarings from the recessed gable pane.
Make your study the unregarded floor.

Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure
The bastion of sensation. Do not waver
Into language. Do not waver in it.


Squarings #8
The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise 
Were all at prayers inside the oratory 
A ship appeared above them in the air. 

The anchor dragged along behind so deep 
It hooked itself into the altar rails 
And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill, 

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope 
And struggled to release it. But in vain. 
‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’ 

The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So 
They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back 
Out of the marvellous as he had known it.


Squarings #40
I was four but I turned four hundred maybe,
Encountering the ancient dampish feel
Of a clay floor. Maybe four thousand even.

Anyhow, there it was. Milk poured for cats
In a rank puddle-place, splash-darkened mould
Around the terracotta water-crock.

Ground of being. Body’s deep obedience
To all its shifting tenses. A half-door
Opening directly into starlight.

Out of that earth house I inherited
A stack of singular, cold memory-weights
To load me, hand and foot, in the scale of things.

Seamus Heaney, 1939-2013 – “Squarings” from Seeing Things