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User Rating: |
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7.5
/10
(27
votes)
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for Michael Longley
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.
One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.
A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.
Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.
Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Seamus Heaney
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Read poems about / on: music, spring, child, dark, sky, children
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Comments about this poem (Personal Helicon
by
Seamus Heaney
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comments about this poem (Personal Helicon by
Seamus Heaney
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Regina Turner
(8/31/2005 5:15:00 AM) |
All of Mr. Heaney poem's remind me so much of my growing years. i grew up in a very Irish family and I can see my grandmother, grandfather and uncles and aunts doing so many of the things Mr. Heaney describes. Thank you, Mr. Heaney.
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