Seamus Heaney Poems

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
...

My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horse strained at his clicking tongue.
...

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
...

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.
...

Her scarf a la Bardot,
In suede flats for the walk,
She came with me one evening
For air and friendly talk.
...

The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley...
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp...
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.
...

All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
...

We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening--
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encrouching horizon,
...

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
...

She taught me what her uncle once taught her:
How easily the biggest coal block split
If you got the grain and the hammer angled right.
...