Seamus Heaney Reading at Colby College

by James Lowe

In the chapel,
throned in the pulpit,
you’re scrubbed and splendid
in the hot spring light,
dripping, not from heat
or from physical exertion.
You say as much another time,
watching your father dig
in flower beds below,
you high and dry at the window above,
digging with your pen, you say.
Your scene’s visceral: its straining,
stooping, rooting, and another:
mining ancient corpses peated brown,
not the turf cutter, you the sculptor,
making them palpable,
the killing grounds, Old Jutland
to yesterday Derry,
sickle in the tall grass
next the slashed throat, dripping.

Mounted here on high,
full of physicality,
though not Lawrence’s horseman
in spring, energy clamped
between his legs,
heavy and blooded
and tangible, and the sex.
Not one for much of that
or Ireland not obliging you,
it severed south from north
consigning you even
as eunuch to relic queens,
the slung weight gone,
the dark, wet flesh grieving.