Meeting Seamus Heaney

Concerned not to leave Susie
waiting for you long back in Sandymount
you arrived
with the purposeful stride of the teacher,
but relaxed once inside the booth,
commenting on how nice it was.

I sat outside with the flattered engineer,
frankly overawed
as you began 'The Little Canticles of Asturias'
realising that we - me, the audio engineer and his wife -
were amongst the first to hear it.

You were unaware of the little goodness
Your visit had brought;
To pleasant people whose year had been troubled
by a child sick as no-one's child should be;
this little special moment
more valuable than you knew
to the woman who still read poetry
and the kindly man hesitant
as he asked you to read the lines again
in case he should make an error.

And you apologised for not being able to reschedule
for the coming Tuesday,
hoped that I would not be late for my plane -
my pregnant wife forced to fly on to London alone
with our nineteen-month-old son.

You read as yourself, we all remarked -
not as The Poet whose voice
is so often used when "scribblers" like yourself
sit to reacquaint themselves with their lines -
knowing the weight of words.

And after we all had coffee.

Wonderful.

I hope the traffic wasn't too heavy on your way home.

2

On the plane to London
newspapers open with the lick and crack
of flames in a hearth.

The taxi-man
who rushed me out here,
(minutes to spare,
no time to get currency before boarding)
Had a good one for them.

Four weeks back, driving to the airport at night,
someone dropped a concrete block
from the fly-over bridge above
down onto him -
his steering wheel still bent
where the block had had entered the windshield
at 70 mph.

He described the whack of it -
breaking his ribs, crushing his teeth.
"Those scumbags" he said.
Left him blinded for three days from the glass,
his chin still bearing livid lipstick lines
from the stitches.
He'd thought he might not see his
six-year-old and three-year-old again,
but with a casual goodness
added that, Christ - how lucky can you get,
another foot one way or the other?
And they must need to be told, he thought,
what was wrong, if they were not
to be turned out scumbags.

And the police had a hard job,
And thankless.

I tried not to look at the scar,
thought of course of my own child

and suddenly realised that he was taking us
the wrong way
through traffic that meant I might miss my plane
before realising why and which road it was
he was avoiding

and wouldn't we all?

3

All of us spoke of our kids,
you the Poet Laureate,
the parents who had thought to lose their daughter
and whose son was off to America on the Sunday,
the taxi driver and I -
'sure isn't that why we go to work?'
Perhaps not you, Seamus; but those you describe
as "Getting Through",
driving the taxi down roads where casual murderers await,
breeze blocks poised,
boredom or madness set to keep you from your kids
for ever.

When I first saw my son I imagined
I saw the clouds of heaven in his eyes
and could not keep from staring.

Now, looking down on the clouds over Howth
and out towards your now-beloved Wicklow
I think of what MacNeice said of the world being
Incorrigibly plural.

You are right of course; you have no need to apologise
for lacking the bravery of Beckett in the Resistance,
of Celan in hell;
your good honest voice
comes strongest from reflection.

We need to tell ourselves
of the unfairness of a child's illness,
of the insane rock that almost but didn't end a life,

And we need to hear such things spoken of in
the right words
and you speak them so well.