It's A Garden Party - Happy Easter!

This feature, originally known as Saturday Farmer's Market, was created by Heather at Capricious Reader, and then hosted by Chris at Stuff as Dreams are Made on.

Finally!

Although my Easter Lily is usually a little late, it has never been this late.

I think I've mentioned before how my garden doesn't seem to have a good grasp on time and seasons. Well, this is a good example. The good news is that it has a lot of buds and looks like it's going to be blooming for a while to come.

Glanmore Sonnets
- Seamus Heaney

For Ann Saddlemyer,
our heartiest welcomer

                               I

Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground.   

The mildest February for twenty years   

Is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound   

Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors.

Our road is steaming, the turned-up acres breathe.   

Now the good life could be to cross a field   

And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe   

Of ploughs. My lea is deeply tilled.

Old ploughsocks gorge the subsoil of each sense   

And I am quickened with a redolence   

Of farmland as a dark unblown rose.

Wait then...Breasting the mist, in sowers’ aprons,   

My ghosts come striding into their spring stations.   

The dream grain whirls like freakish Easter snows.

                                  II

Sensings, mountings from the hiding places,   

Words entering almost the sense of touch   

Ferreting themselves out of their dark hutch—

‘These things are not secrets but mysteries,’   

Oisin Kelly told me years ago

In Belfast, hankering after stone

That connived with the chisel, as if the grain   

Remembered what the mallet tapped to know.   

Then I landed in the hedge-school of Glanmore   

And from the backs of ditches hoped to raise

A voice caught back off slug-horn and slow chanter   

That might continue, hold, dispel, appease:   

Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground,   

Each verse returning like the plough turned round.

                                  III

This evening the cuckoo and the corncrake   

(So much, too much) consorted at twilight.   

It was all crepuscular and iambic.   

Out on the field a baby rabbit

Took his bearings, and I knew the deer

(I’ve seen them too from the window of the house,   

Like connoisseurs, inquisitive of air)   

Were careful under larch and May-green spruce.   

I had said earlier, ‘I won’t relapse   

From this strange loneliness I’ve brought us to.   

Dorothy and William—’ She interrupts:   

‘You’re not going to compare us two...?’   

Outside a rustling and twig-combing breeze   

Refreshes and relents. Is cadences.

                                  IV

I used to lie with an ear to the line

For that way, they said, there should come a sound   

Escaping ahead, an iron tune

Of flange and piston pitched along the ground,   

But I never heard that. Always, instead,

Struck couplings and shuntings two miles away   

Lifted over the woods. The head

Of a horse swirled back from a gate, a grey   

Turnover of haunch and mane, and I’d look   

Up to the cutting where she’d soon appear.

Two fields back, in the house, small ripples shook   

Silently across our drinking water

(As they are shaking now across my heart)

And vanished into where they seemed to start.

                                  V

Soft corrugations in the boortree’s trunk,

Its green young shoots, its rods like freckled solder:   

It was our bower as children, a greenish, dank

And snapping memory as I get older.

And elderberry I have learned to call it.

I love its blooms like saucers brimmed with meal,   

Its berries a swart caviar of shot,

A buoyant spawn, a light bruised out of purple.   

Elderberry? It is shires dreaming wine.

Boortree is bower tree, where I played ‘touching tongues’

And felt another’s texture quick on mine.

So, etymologist of roots and graftings,

I fall back to my tree-house and would crouch

Where small buds shoot and flourish in the hush.

                                  VI

He lived there in the unsayable lights.

He saw the fuchsia in a drizzling noon,

The elderflower at dusk like a risen moon

And green fields greying on the windswept heights.   

‘I will break through,’ he said, ‘what I glazed over   

With perfect mist and peaceful absences’—

Sudden and sure as the man who dared the ice   

And raced his bike across the Moyola River.   

A man we never saw. But in that winter

Of nineteen forty-seven, when the snow

Kept the country bright as a studio,

In a cold where things might crystallize or founder,   

His story quickened us, a wild white goose

Heard after dark above the drifted house.

                                  VII

Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea:

Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux   

Conjured by that strong gale-warning voice,   

Collapse into a sibilant penumbra.

Midnight and closedown. Sirens of the tundra,

Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road, raise   

Their wind-compounded keen behind the baize   

And drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow.   

L’Etoile, Le Guillemot, La Belle Hélène   

Nursed their bright names this morning in the bay   

That toiled like mortar. It was marvellous   

And actual, I said out loud, ‘A haven,’   

The word deepening, clearing, like the sky   

Elsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes.

                                  VIII

Thunderlight on the split logs: big raindrops   

At body heat and lush with omen

Spattering dark on the hatchet iron.

This morning when a magpie with jerky steps   

Inspected a horse asleep beside the wood   

I thought of dew on armour and carrion.

What would I meet, blood-boltered, on the road?   

How deep into the woodpile sat the toad?

What welters through this dark hush on the crops?   

Do you remember that pension in Les Landes   

Where the old one rocked and rocked and rocked   

A mongol in her lap, to little songs?   

Come to me quick, I am upstairs shaking.   

My all of you birchwood in lightning.

                                  IX

Outside the kitchen window a black rat

Sways on the briar like infected fruit:

‘It looked me through, it stared me out, I’m not   

Imagining things. Go you out to it.’

Did we come to the wilderness for this?

We have our burnished bay tree at the gate,

Classical, hung with the reek of silage

From the next farm, tart-leafed as inwit.

Blood on a pitchfork, blood on chaff and hay,

Rats speared in the sweat and dust of threshing—

What is my apology for poetry?

The empty briar is swishing

When I come down, and beyond, inside, your face   

Haunts like a new moon glimpsed through tangled glass.

                                  X

I dreamt we slept in a moss in Donegal

On turf banks under blankets, with our faces   

Exposed all night in a wetting drizzle,   

Pallid as the dripping sapling birches.   

Lorenzo and Jessica in a cold climate.   

Diarmuid and Grainne waiting to be found.   

Darkly asperged and censed, we were laid out   

Like breathing effigies on a raised ground.

And in that dream I dreamt—how like you this?—

Our first night years ago in that hotel   

When you came with your deliberate kiss   

To raise us towards the lovely and painful   

Covenants of flesh; our separateness;   

The respite in our dewy dreaming faces.

from: Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996. Copyright 1998.