Michael Longley

A fastidious brewer of tea, a tea
Connoisseur as well as a poet,
I modestly request on my sixtieth
Birthday a gift of snow water.
...

We were combatants from the start. Our dad
Bought us boxing gloves when we were ten —
Champions like Euryalus, say, or Epeius
...

These are the small hours when
Moths by their fatal appetite
Which thatbrings them tapping to get in,
...

Amateur witches and professional virgins,
Sirens and shepherdesses - all new areas
Of experience (I have been out of touch) -
...

Achilles hunts down Hector like a sparrowhawk
Screeching after a horror-struck collared-dove
That flails just in front of her executioner, so
...

Pulling up flax after the blue flowers have fallen
And laying our handfuls in the peaty water
To rot those grasses to the bone, or building stooks
...

This is your first night in Carrigskeewaun.
The Owennadornaun is so full of rain
You arrived in Paddy Morrison's tractor,
...

You showed me my twin's feet when he was dead,
Your sailor-husband's feet, your engineer's - how
Cold they felt, how handsome ankle and toe,
...

As if a one-room schoolhouse were all we knew
And our clothes were black, our underclothes black,
Marriage a horse and buggy going to church
...

Inauspicious between headstones
On Angel Hill, wintry love
Tokens for Murdo, Alistair,
...

Dear old brother-in-law, I've flown home
Across the Atlantic. I'm far away, but you
...

A wintry night, the hearth inhales
And the chimney becomes a windpipe
Fluffy with soot and thistledown,
...

Let me make room for bog cotton, a desert flower -
Keith Douglas, I nearly repeat what you were saying
When you apostrophised the poppies of Flanders
...

Cattle out of their byres are dungy still, lambs
Have stepped from last year as from an enclosure.
Five or six men stand gazing at a rusty tractor
...

You give me cloudberry jam from Lapland,
Bog amber, snow-line titbits, scrumptious
Cloudberries sweetened slowly by the cold,
And costly enough for cloudberry wars
...

If you were to read my poems, all of them, I mean,
My life's work, at the one sitting, in the one place,
Let it be here by this half-hearted waterfall
That allows each pebbly basin its separate say,
...

Beneath a gas-mantle that the moths bombard,
Light that powders at a touch, dusty wings,
I listen for news through the atmospherics,
A crackle of sea-wrack, spinning driftwood,
...

The Mountain

This is ravens' territory, skulls, bones,
The marrow of these boulders supervised
From the upper air: I stand alone here
...

Thirty-six years, to the day, after our wedding
When a cold figure-revealing wind blew against you
And lifted your veil, I find in its fat envelope
The six-shilling Vogue pattern for your bride's dress,
...

They kept him alive for years in warm water,
The soldier who had lost his skin.
At night
...