A Poem for Thursday....Beyond Silence (with many thanks to S. Heaney)

Is it the rhythm of the wheels on the motorway surface or the rapidly changing landscape that stimulates my mind so much when we take long road trips. The radio is on...sharply relaxed in the seat by the potter...watching out for fools on the road. They love roads do fools...learnt that by my father's side as he taught me to drive in my teenage years.

Beyond Silence
Something beautiful happened
On our way down the M6
England's main blood line.
A great flock of starlings
and a murmuration! While
Snow spat down on us and 
The wind struck hard as iron.
Leaving us with only
A holy heavy silence.

Poetic Elements

The elements I'm talking about are the elements you find the further west you go in Ireland....

Donegal and the roaring sea coming in from America...The Atlantic...
And the way it leads to poetry.

Well this is a very emotional week for us Irish.

From the era of post-Yeats when it seemed noone could surpass him and his mystical lines...
...suddenly came the farmer's son who gave us gave us earth...
                ...came Seamus Heaney....

... the digging...the tilling...the ploughing...the calloused hands that my father bore as he worked the soil when I was young....before my city mother persuaded him to give it up....

So first a Yeats gem....

TO A CHILD DANCING IN THE WIND
Dance there upon the shore;
what need have you to care
For wind or water's roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet;
Being young you have not known
The fool's triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won,
Nor the best labourer dead.
And all the sheaves to bind.
What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of wind? 


and then Heaney in all his honesty...

The Peninsula
by Seamus Heaney
When you have nothing more to say, just drive
For a day all around the peninsula,
The sky is tall as over a runway,
The land without marks, so you will not arrive
But pass through, though always skirting landfall.
At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill,
The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable
And you're in the dark again.  Now recall
The glazed foreshore and silhoutted log.
That rock where breakers shredded into rags,
The leggy birds stilted on their own legs,
Islands riding themselves out into the fog.
And then drive back home, still with nothing to say
Except that now you will uncode all landscapes
By this; things founded clean on their own shapes
Water and ground in their extremity.

                                  Muckross Rocks Donegal July 2013

I owe so much to these poets who encircled first my childhood ...and then my adult thinking.....

Thankyou.

Restore my Soul...

I have needed my soul and emotional equilibrium restored recently....and today another blow came with a first class letter from the hospital....
I am actually amazed at how much we can take...and perhaps it's as we build on the past and realise we are still here that it happens.
I listened to the wonderful interview with Simon Armitage and Seamus Heaney last week...Heaney said that his work was built on the foundations of those poets who have gone before ...or words to that effect...

Being up at the Bay in the storm...you couldn't help but think back to Masefield's wonderful sea poem...
..."I must go down to the sea again,
to the lonely sea and the sky"....

So although I wrote this before I listened to Seamus Heaney.......Masefield's poem was deep inside me.

The sea ,the sea,

The roiling sea.

I must go down 

To sate my need.

My need , my need,

To sate my need.

For elemental 

Wind and water.

The wind, the wind,

The sucking wind.

Within my soul

It succours me.

My soul, my soul

That succours me.

Come claim me back

Come wind, come sea.

This is one for dVerse today.http://dversepoets.com/2013/02/05/openlinknight-week-82/#comment-29436http://dversepoets.com/2013/02/05/openlinknight-week-82/#comment-29436..I'm almost last in the pub...but just made it.

I'm adding Poetry Jam on the bottom of this post...just found a super poem on twitter