Selected Poems 1966-1987 by Seamus Heaney

Author:Seamus Heaney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Sweeney Astray

I would live happy

in an ivy bush

high in some twisted tree

and never come out.

The skylarks rising

to their high space

send me pitching and tripping

over stumps on the moor

and my hurry flushes

the turtle-dove.

I overtake it,

my plumage rushing,

am startled

by the startled woodcock

or a blackbird’s sudden

volubility.

Think of my alarms,

my coming to earth

where the fox still

gnaws at the bones,

my wild career

as the wolf from the wood

goes tearing ahead

and I lift towards the mountain,

the bark of foxes

echoing below me,

the wolves behind me

howling and rending—

their vapoury tongues,

their low-slung speed

shaken off like nightmare

at the foot of the slope.

If I show my heels

I am hobbled by guilt.

I am a sheep

without a fold

who sleeps his sound sleep

in the old tree at Kilnoo,

dreaming back the good days

with Congal in Antrim.

A starry frost will come

dropping on pools

and I’ll be astray here

on unsheltered heights:

herons calling

in cold Glenelly,

flocks of birds quickly

coming and going.

I prefer the elusive

rhapsody of blackbirds

to the garrulous blather

of men and women.

I prefer the squeal of badgers

in their sett

to the tally-ho

of the morning hunt.

I prefer the re-

echoing belling of a stag

among the peaks

to that arrogant horn.

Those unharnessed runners

from glen to glen!

Nobody tames

that royal blood,

each one aloof

on its rightful summit,

antlered, watchful.

Imagine them,

the stag of high Slieve Felim,

the stag of the steep Fews,

the stag of Duhallow, the stag of Orrery,

the fierce stag of Killarney.

The stag of Islandmagee, Larne’s stag,

the stag of Moylinny,

the stag of Cooley, the stag of Cunghill,

the stag of the two-peaked Burren.

The mother of this herd

is old and grey,

the stags that follow her

are branchy, many-tined.

I would be cloaked in the grey

sanctuary of her head,

I would roost among

her mazy antlers

and would be lofted into

this thicket of horns

on the stag that lows at me

over the glen.

I am Sweeney, the whinger,

the scuttler in the valley.

But call me, instead,

Peak-pate, Stag-head.

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