Ireland

Seamus Heaney, Digging, 1966:

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. Under my window, a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: My father, digging. I look down Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds Bends low, comes up twenty years away Stooping in rhythm through potato drills Where he was digging. The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft Against the inside knee was levered firmly. He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep To scatter new potatoes that we picked, Loving their cool hardness in our hands. By God, the old man could handle a spade. Just like his old man. My grandfather cut more turf in a day Than any other man on Toners bog. Once I carried him milk in a bottle Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up To drink it, then fell to right away Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods Over his shoulder, going down and down For the good turf. Digging. The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge Through living roots awaken in my head. But Ive no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. Ill dig with it.

W. B. Yeats, Leda and the Swan, 1928:

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies? A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower[20] And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Tom Paulin, Desertmartin, 1993:

This is a far-off place in the North of Ireland called Desertmartin At noon, in the dead centre of a faith, Between Draperstown and Magherafelt, This bitter village shows the flag in a baked absolute September light. Here the Word has withered to a few Parched certainties, and the charred stubble Tightens like a black belt, a crop of Bibles.

Because this is the territory of the Law I drive across it with a powerless knowledge The owl of Minerva in a hired car. A Jock squaddy glances down the street

And grins, happy and expendable, Like a brass cartridge. He is a useful thing, Almost at home, and yet not quite, not quite.

Its a limed nest, this place, I see a plain Presbyterian grace sour, then harden, As a free strenuous spirit changes To a servile defiance that whines and shrieks For the bondage of the letter: it shouts For the Big Man to lead his wee people To a clean white prison, their scorched tomorrow.

Masculine Islam, the rule of the Just, Egyptian sand dunes and geometry, A theology of rifle-butts and executions: These are the places where the spirit dies. And now, in Desertmartins sandy light, I see a culture of twigs and bird-shit Waving a gaudy flag it loves and curses.

Eavan Boland, The Lost Land, 1998:

I have two daughters. They are all I ever wanted from the earth. Or almost all. I also wanted one piece of ground: One city trapped by hills. One urban river. An island in its element. So I could say mine. My own. And mean it. Now they are grown up and far away

and memory itself has become an emigrant, wandering in a place where love dissembles itself as landscape: Where the hills are the colours of a child's eyes, where my children are distances, horizons: At night, on the edge of sleep, I can see the shore of Dublin Bay. Its rocky sweep and its granite pier. Is this, I say how they must have seen it, backing out on the mailboat at twilight, shadows falling on everything they had to leave? And would love forever? And then I imagine myself at the landward rail of that boat searching for the last sight of a hand. I see myself on the underworld side of that water, the darkness coming in fast, saying all the names I know for a lost land:

Ireland. Absence. Daughter.