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Seamus Heaney Statues with exposed hearts and barbed-wire crowns Still stood in alcoves, hares flitted beneath The dozing bellies of jets, our menu-writers And punks with aerosol sprays held their own With the best of them. Satellite link-ups Wafted over us the blessings of popes, heliports Maintained a charmed circle for idols on tour And casualties on their stretchers. We sleepwalked The line between panic and formulae, screentested Our first native models and the last of the mummers, Watching ourselves at a distance, advantaged And airy as a man on a springboard Who keeps limbering up because the man cannot dive. And then in the foggy midlands it appeared, Our mud vision, as if a rose window of mud Had invented itself out of the glittery damp, A gossamer wheel, concentric with its own hub Of nebulous dirt, sullied yet luccent. We had heard of the sun standing still and the sun That changed colour, but we were vouchsafed Original clay, transfigured and spinning. And then the sunsets ran murky, the wiper Could never entirely clean off the windscreen, Reservoirs tasted of silt, a light fuzz Accrued in the hair and the eyebrows, and some Took to wearing a smudge on their foreheads To be prepared for whatever. Vigils Began to be kept around pudddled gaps, On altars bulrushes ousted the lilies And a rota of invalids came and went On beds they could lease placed in range of the shower. A generation who had seen a sign! Those nights when we stood in an umber dew and smelled Mould in the verbena, or woke to a light Furrow-breath on the pillow, when the talk Was all about who had seen it and our fear Was touched with a secret pride, only ourselves Could be adequate then to our lives. When the rainbow Curved flood-brown and ran like a water-rat's back So that drivers on the hard shoulder switched off to watch, We wished it away, and yet we presumed it a test That would prove us beyond expectation. We lived, of course, to learn the folly of that. One day it was gone and the east gable Where its trembling corolla had balanced Was starkly a ruin again, with dandelions Blowing high up on the ledges, and moss That slumbered on through its increase. As cameras raked The site from every angle, experts Began their post factum jabber and all of us Crowded in tight for the big explanations. Just like that, we forgot that the vision was ours, Our one chance to know the incomparable And dive to a future. What might have been origin We dissipated in news. The clarified place Had retrieved neither us nor itself -- except You could say we survived. So say that, and watch us Who had our chance to be mud-men, convinced and estranged, Figure in our own eyes for the eyes of the world. 1987 |