North by Seamus Heaney Page A

though the drummers
    Are granted passage through the nodding crowd,
    It is the drums preside, like giant tumours.
     
    To every cocked ear, expert in its greed,
    His battered signature subscribes 'No Pope'.
    The goatskin's sometimes plastered with his blood.
    The air is pounding like a stethoscope.
     

4. SUMMER 1969
     
    While the Constabulary covered the mob
    Firing into the Falls, I was suffering
    Only the bullying sun of Madrid.
    Each afternoon, in the casserole heat
    Of the flat, as I sweated my way through
    The life of Joyce, stinks from the fishmarket
    Rose like the reek off a flax-dam.
    At night on the balcony, gules of wine,
    A sense of children in their dark corners,
    Old women in black shawls near open windows,
    The air a canyon rivering in Spanish.
    We talked our way home over starlit plains
    Where patent leather of the Guardia-Civil
    Gleamed like fish-bellies in flax-poisoned waters.
     
    'Go back,' one said, 'try to touch the people.'
    Another conjured Lorca from his hill.
    We sat through death-counts and bullfight reports
    On the television, celebrities
    Arrived from where the real thing still happened.
     
    I retreated to the cool of the Prado.
    Goya's 'Shootings of the Third of May'
    Covered a wall---the thrown-up arms
    And spasm of the rebel, the helmeted
    And knapsacked military, the efficient
    Rake of the fusillade. In the next room,
    His nightmares, grafted to the palace wall---
    Dark cyclones, hosting, breaking; Saturn
     
    Jewelled in the blood of his own children;
    Gigantic Chaos turning his brute hips
    Over the world. Also, that holmgang
    Where two berserks club each other to death
    For honour's sake, greaved in a bog, and sinking.
     
    He painted with his fists and elbows, flourished
    The stained cape of his heart as history charged.
     

5. FOSTERAGE
     
For Michael McLaverty
     
    'Description is revelation!' Royal
    Avenue, Belfast, 1962,
    A Saturday afternoon, glad to meet
    Me, newly cubbed in language, he gripped
    My elbow. 'Listen. Go your own way.
    Do your own work. Remember
    Katherine Mansfield---I will tell
    How the laundry basket squeaked ... that note of exile.'
    But to hell with overstating it:
    'Don't have the veins bulging in your biro.'
    And then, 'Poor Hopkins!' I have the Journals
    He gave me, underlined, his buckled self
    Obeisant to their pain. He discerned
    The lineaments of patience everywhere
    And fostered me and sent me out, with words
    Imposing on my tongue like obols.
     

6. EXPOSURE
     
    It is December in Wicklow:
    Alders dripping, birches
    Inheriting the last light,
    The ash tree cold to look at.
     
    A comet that was lost
    Should be visible at sunset,
    Those million tons of light
    Like a glimmer of haws and rose-hips,
     
    And I sometimes see a falling star.
    If I could come on meteorite!
    Instead I walk through damp leaves,
    Husks, the spent flukes of autumn,
     
    Imagining a hero
    On some muddy compound,
    His gift like a slingstone
    Whirled for the desperate.
     
    How did I end up like this?
    I often think of my friends'
    Beautiful prismatic counselling
    And the anvil brains of some who hate me
     
    As I sit weighing and weighing
    My responsible tristia.
    For what? For the ear? For the people?
    For what is said behind-backs?
     
    Rain comes down through the alders,
    Its low conducive voices
    Mutter about let-downs and erosions
    And yet each drop recalls
     
    The diamond absolutes.
    I am neither internee nor informer;
    An inner émigré, grown long-haired
    And thoughtful; a wood-kerne
     
    Escaped from the massacre,
    Taking protective colouring
    From bole and bark, feeling
    Every wind that blows;
     
    Who, blowing up these sparks
    For their meagre heat, have missed
    The once-in-a-lifetime portent,
    The comet's pulsing rose.

    [END OF BOOK]