When Seamus Heaney died, I wrote the lines below on Twitter in improvised tribute. I didn’t think they amounted to much, formally, so I was all the more flattered when Liz Nugent chose them for this piece in The Irish Times.
You did this. You showed us we were right to think it our own, the language we found gleaming in ditches, the leavings of queens.
You paced out the avenue, took your ease in the drawing room. And this the home of the statesman, the trembling mage, the fairy-fancier.
When you opened the cabinets, certain items stilled you. A thick hilt, crumbed in fast blood. You passed over opera glasses, posied plates.
You went over old ground, down two spits. Past the sweet tilth to the cold, sharded glut. To hoe blades, dim chalices, back teeth.
You were garlanded, and yet the least bedecked. You scored the rich hems of cardinals. Listened for the flit and thud, the dagger drop.
You smoothed out the unwritten leaf. Felt it chaste as sick day sheets. Of one weave with summer dresses, with the tatters after bombs.
Paraic O’Donnell 