P.s.:
The Tollund Man
I
Some day I will go to Århus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.
In the flat country nearby
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach,
Naked exept for
The cap, noose and girdle,
I will stand a long time,
Bridegroom to the goddess,
She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint's kept body,
Trove of the turfcutters'
Honeycombed workings.
Now his stained face
Reposes at Århus.
II
I could risk blasphemy,
Consecratethe cauldron bog
Our holy ground and pray
Him to make germinate
The scattered, ambushed
Flesh of labourers,
Stockinged corpses
Laid out in the farmyards,
Tell-tale skin and teeth
Flecking the sleepers
Of four young brothers, trailed
For miles along the lines.
III
Something of his sad freedom
As he rode the tumbril
Should come to me, driving,
Saying the names
Tollund, Graubaulle, Nebelgard,
Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.
Out there in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.
*
A New Song
I met a girl from Derrygarve
And the name, a lost potent musk,
Recalled the river's song swerve,
A kingfisher's blue bolt at dusk
And stepping stones like black molars
Sunk in the ford, the swifty glaze
Of the whirlpool, the Moyola
Pleasuring beneath alder trees.
And Derrygrave, I thought, was just,
Vanished music, twilit water,
Amooth libation of the past
Poured by this chancevastal daugther.
But now our river tongues must rise
From licking deep in native haunts
To flood, with vowelling embrace,
Demesnes staked out in consonants.
And Castledawson we'll enlist
And Upperlands, each planted bawn -
Like bleaching-greens resumed by grass -
A vocable, as rath and bullaun.
- Seamus Heaney.
mvh
Simon