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Unknown: Two Minute call. It doesn't need to take ten days, does it? You decide and let us know. Morton Marcus: She wrote: I began to write in an enclosed self-confident literary culture.

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The poet's life stood in a burnished light in the Ireland of that time, poets were still poor, had little sponsored work and could not depend on a sympathetic reaction to their poetry, but the idea of the poet was honored. It was an emblem to

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the whole culture that self-expression and survival could combine, a contested emblem. Certainly, the relation was never easy, and may even in certain ways have been corrupt, but it existed, it was there. A poet was remarked upon, and

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pointed out, was sometimes quoted, and the habits and sayings of poets frequently found their way into a sort of image file of idiosyncrasy, which further reinforced the sense of poetry as something in high relief and set apart. A

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woman's life was not honored. At least no one I knew suggested that it was exemplary in the way a poet's was. As dusk fell in the city, a conversational life intensified. Libraries filled up, the green cowl lamps went on, the light pooled onto open

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pages, the pubs were crowded, the cafes were full of students and apprentice writers like myself, some of them talking about literature, a very few talking intensely about poetry. Only a few miles away was the almost invisible world that

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everyone knew of, and no one referred to, of suburbs and housing estates, of children and women, of fires lighted for the first winter chill, a food put on the table, the so-called ordinary world, which most of us had come from, and some would

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return to on the last bus, was not even mentioned. Young poets are like children, they assume the dangers to themselves are those their elders identified. They internalize the menace without analyzing it. It was not said, it was not even

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consciously thought, and yet I absorbed the sense that poetry was safe here in the city of twilight, with its violet sky and constant drizzle, within the circle of libraries and pubs and talks about stanzas and cadences. Beyond, it was the

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ordinariness which could only dissipate it, beyond it was a life for which no visionary claim could be made. The opposite is now true. A woman's life -- its sexuality, its ritual, its history -- has become a brilliantly lit motif,

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influencing the agenda of culture and commerce alike. At the same time, the old construct of the poet's life for which I have such an exasperated tenderness has lost some of the faith and trust of the society. Increasingly, it is perceived as

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arcane and worse, as a code of outdated power systems, whose true purpose was to exalt not the poet's capacity to suffer, but his suitability for election to a category which made him or her exempt from the shared experience of others.

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Hello, this is Mort Marcus and tonight we are going to have a St. Patrick's Day Program featuring two of the most well-known Irish poets alive today. The first who I just read from, the marvelous Eavan Boland, if you have not heard of

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her, if you have not read her poetry, may this be an introduction to her. Eavan Boland was very acutely aware as she grew -- and grew in exile in England because her father was in the diplomatic corps for the Irish Republic -- was very aware

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in time that women were not equals in Irish society, not only in the social life of the society but in poetry. They were, in her own words, muses, they were symbols, but they were not reality. And she goes back to the great Irish poets,

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including Yeats, who she really loves very much, and- and says that a woman's world was not real. I would urge you to read the book I just started to read from, it's a book called, "Object Lessons: the Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time."

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It is a brilliant, brilliant piece of prose, it reads at times like a novel, it is very provocative and thought-provoking. But Eavan Boland is also a poet, and a poet of absolutely the first rank. I think her last book, "In

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a Time of Violence," really reaches to new heights of her work. And what I would like to do for the first twenty-five minutes of the show now is to read Eavan Boland's poems, and then for the second half, turn to another Irish poet and that

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is Seamus Heaney, who in 1995, won the Nobel Prize. And in fact, in the second half of the show, we will hear Seamus Heaney reading his poems from his latest book, "The Spirit Level." So, let us just go into some of these poems that Eavan Boland

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wrote and which can now be gotten published by Norton, in a book called, "Outside History: Selected Poems, 1980-1990." Since then, she's had two more books and these are her early works now from several different books being brought together. So

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let me just read you just a different selection of these poems. And again, Irish myth, the wonderful Irish heroines, the beautiful muse-like queens that certainly is talked about all the time, and a lot of other Irish poets talked about. This

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is now the kind of poetry that Eavan Boland's concerned with, and she does go into myth, and I'm going to go into her mythic poems. But first, let's do what I would call her domestic poems. And this is a marvelous little piece, called, "The Oral

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Tradition." She begins "Object Lessons" talking about her grandmother, her grandmother becomes her symbol, her grandmother has had a life that has virtually been forgotten -- she did not read, she was not educated -- it was that she-

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people were not concerned with her, were not concerned with her grandmother's experience. And all that you remember are some words, oral words that you take with you through memory and bring into your own life and into your own work and this has

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been a problem with women. And in, "Object Lessons," and in her poems, it is very good to read the books together because, in many ways, "Objects Lessons" makes the poems deeper, if not, certainly does make them clearer, but certainly makes

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them deeper as well. In, "The Oral Tradition," a poem that she wrote back in the 80s, we hear this idea of women's speech again, of not only women's speech, but women's experience, so I would like to start reading that. And notice that this is

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after a workshop. She has been conducting a workshop as a poet. In fact, she conducts workshops everywhere, and I don't know if it's the last several years but certainly the year before last and the year before that she was teaching workshops at Stanford

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University. And here is, "The Oral Tradition," which happened obviously after one of these evening workshops with women. THE ORAL TRADITION I was standing there at the end of a reading or a workshop or

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whatever, watching people heading out into the weather, only half wondering what becomes of words, the brisk herbs of language, the fragrances we think we sing, if anything. We were left behind in a firelit room in which the color scheme

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crouched well down, gold, a sort of dun, a distressed ocre. And the sole richness was in the suggestion of a texture like the low flax gleam that comes off polished leather. Two women were standing in shadow, one with her back turned. Their talk was a

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gesture, an outstretched hand. They talked to each other and words like "summer, birth, great grandmother" kept pleading with me, urging me to follow [them]. "She could feel it coming," one of them was saying. "All the way there, across the fields at

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evening and no one there -- God, help her -- and she had on a skirt of cross-woven linen and the little one kept pulling at it. It was nearly night..." (Wood hissed and spit in the open grate, broke apart in sparks, a windfall of light in

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the room's darkness). "...when she lay down and gave birth to him in an open meadow. What a child that was to be born without a blemish!" It had started raining. The windows dripped, misted. One moment I was standing, not seeing out,

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only half listening, staring at the night, the next without warning, I was caught by it, the bruised summer light, the musical sub-text of mauve eaves on lilac, and the laburnum past and shadow where the lime tree dropped its bracts in frills of

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contrast where she lay down in vetch and linen and lifted up her son to the archive they would shelter in: The oral song, avid as superstition, layered like an amber in the wreck of language and the remnants of a nation. I was getting out my

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coat, buttoning it, shrugging up the collar. It was bitter outside, a real winter's night and I had distances ahead of me, iron miles and trains, iron rails repeating instances and reasons; the wheels singing innuendoes, hints, outlines

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underneath the surface, a sense suddenly of truth, its resonance. So, it seems to me that one of the differences- there are several differences here. There is not the willingness, but

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almost the lack of choice in listening to the words of women's experiences because she lives women's experiences, and yet at the same time, because she does, being alive and attuned to the world of women, which was the first thing I

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read, Irish male poets were not. The woman's life, the life of the household was not honored. Let me read yet another poem. Here is: THE WOMAN, and it goes like this.

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This is the hour I love, the in-between, neither here-nor-there hour of evening. The air is tea-colored in the garden, the briar rose is spilled crêpe-de-Chine. This is the time I do my work best, going up the stairs in two

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minutes- in two minds, in two worlds, carrying cloth or glass, leaving something behind, bringing something with me I should have left behind. The hour of change, of metamorphosis, of shape shifting instabilities. My time of sixth

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sense and second sight, when in the words I choose, the lines I write, they rise like visions and appear to me. Women of war, of leisure, of the night, in stove-colored silks, in lace, in nothing, with crewel needles and books with wide open legs, who

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fled the hot breath of the god pursuing, who ran from the split hoof and the thick lips and fell and grieved and healed into myth, into me in the evening at my desk, testing the water with a sweet quartet, the physical force of a dissonance, the

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fission of music into syllabic heat. And getting sick of it and standing up and going downstairs in the last brightness, into a landscape without emphasis, light, linear, precisely planned, a hemisphere of tiered, aired cotton, a hot terrain of

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linen from the iron, folded in and over, stacked high neated flat, stoving heat and white. And they're talking about that time when the day's work is done and she moves into twilight, she also moves into a twilight

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world. She is moving out of the woman's world towards the world of the room she writes in upstairs, but notice it is also the image of mythology which more and more of her work will take her to, and which is of course a very, very common Irish

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poetic theme. "The woman who fled the hot breath of the god pursuing, who ran from the split hoof and the thick lips and fell and grieved and healed into myth" are those lines. A similar kind of poem is a poem called:

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NOCTURNE, again, about night and evening. After a friend has gone, I like the feel of it, the house at night- [Commentary] And by the way, let me just say, you know, the women

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who are listening to this out there, just think and see how this reflects your experience, obviously. NOCTURNE After a friend has gone, I like the feel of it, the house of

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night, everyone asleep, the way it draws in like atmosphere or evening. One o'clock: a floral teapot and a raisin scone. A tray waits to be taken down, the landing light is off, the clock strikes, the cat comes into his own, mysterious on the stairs, a

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black ambivalence around the legs of button-back chairs an insinuation to be set beside the red spoon and the salt-glazed cup. The saucer with the thick spill of tea which scalds off easily under the tap. Time is a tick, a purr, a drop. The spider

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on the dining room window has fallen asleep among complexities as I will once the doors are bolted and the keys tested and the switch turned up of the kitchen light which made outside in the black back garden an electric room, a domestication

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of closed daisies, an architecture instant and improbable. And one of my favorites, because it really is marvelous and moves into this world of myth her later work will move into more

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and more, it's called, "Listen, This Is the Noise of Myth." And this is almost like a medieval tale, almost like a medieval ballad and is in fact in four beats in a line and four stanzas, and though it's rhyme scheme is not the ballad rhyme

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scheme, it certainly moves like a ballad. LISTEN, THIS IS THE NOISE OF MYTH This is the story of a man and woman under a willow and beside a weir near a river in a wooded clearing. They are fugitives.

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Intimates of myth. Fictions of my purpose. I suppose I shouldn't say that yet, or at least before I break their hearts or save their lives, I ought to tell their story and I will. When they went first, it was winter. Cold, cold through

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the Midlands and as far West as they could go. They knew they had to go through Meath, Westeath, [lanes for-] Longford. Their lives unraveling like the hours of light and then there were lambs under the snow and it was January, aconite and jasmine

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and the hazel yellowing and puce berries along the bay on the ivy. They could not eat where they had cooked, nor sleep where they had eaten, nor at dawn rest where they havd slept. They shunned the densities of trees with one trunk and of caves [and

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with caves] with one dark and the dangerous embrace of islands with a single landing place. And all the time it was cold, cold: The fields still gardened by their ice, the trees stitched with snow overnight. The ditches full, frost toughening lichen,

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darning lace into rock crevices. And then the woods flooded and buds blunted from the chestnut and the foxglove put its big leaves out and chaffinches chinked and flirted in the branches of the ash. And here we are where we started from, under

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a willow and beside a weir near a river in a wooded clearing. The woman and the man have come to rest. Look how light is coming through the ash. The weir sluices kingfisher blues, the woman and the willow tree lean forward, forward. Something is

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near, something is about to happen, something more than spring and less than history. Will we see hungers eased after months of hiding? Is there a touch of heat in that light? If they stay here soon it will be summer, things returning,

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sunlight fingering minnowy deeps, seedy greens, reeds, electing lights and edges from the river. Consider legend, self-deception, sin, the sum of human purpose and its end. Remember how our poetry depends on distance, aspect: gravity

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will bend starlight. Forgive me if I set the truth to rights. Bear with me if I put an end to this. She never turned to him, she never leaned under the sallow willow over to him. They never made love, not there, not here, not anywhere. There was no

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winter journey, no aconite, no birdsong and no jasmine, no woodland and no river and no weir. Listen, this is the noise of myth, it makes the same sound as shadow. Can you hear it? Daylight grays in the preceptories. Her head begins to

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shine, pivoting the planets of a harsh nativity. They were never mine. This is mine. This sequence of evicted possibilities. Displaced facts. Tricks of light. Reflections. Invention. Legend. Myth. What you will. The shifts and

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fluencies are infinite, the moving parts are marvelous. Consider how the bereavements of the definite are easily lifted from our heroine. She may or she may not. She was or wasn't by the water at his side as dark waited above the Western

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countryside. O consolation of the craft, how we put the old poultices on the old sores, the same mirrors to the old magic. Look. The scene returns. The willow sees itself drowning in the weir and the woman gives the kiss of myth her human heat.

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Reflections, reflections. He becomes her lover. The old romances make no bones about it. The long and short of it. The end and the beginning. The glories and the ornaments are muted. And when the story ends the song is over.

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Let me read from her latest book now which is called, "In a Time of Violence," and I certainly would suggest that you pick up these books by Eavan Boland. First name is spelled E-A-V-A-N but it's pronounced Yvonn. And here is a poem by her called,

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"Love." And it just seems that these later poems of hers are just much more open, even on the page they're more open and there is more of a giving in a clarity and directness in these last poems of hers.

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LOVE Dark falls on this mid-western town where we once lived when myths collided. Dusk has hid in the bridge and the river, which slides and deepens to become the water the hero crossed on his

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way to hell. Not far from here is our old apartment. We had a kitchen and an Amish table. We had a view. And we discovered there love had the feather and muscle of wings and had come to live with us, a brother of fire and air. We had two infant

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children, one of whom was touched by death in this town and spared. And when the hero was hailed by his comrades in hell, their mouths open and their voices failed and there is no knowing what they would have asked about a life they had

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shared and lost. I am your wife. It was years ago. Our child is healed. We love each other still. Across our day to day in ordinary distances we speak plainly. We hear each other clearly. And yet I want to return to you on the bridge of

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the Iowa River as you were with snow on the shoulders of your coat and a car passing with its headlights on: I see you as a hero in a text, the image blazing in the edges gilded, and I long to cry out the epic question, my dear companion:

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Will we ever live so intensely again? Will love come to us again and be so formidable at rest it offers us ascension even to look at him? But the words are shadows and you cannot hear me. You walk away and I cannot follow.

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And if the landscape sounded strange to you in that poem, it is because that is when Eavan Boland was teaching at the State University of Iowa Writers Workshop. As I said, she has done a lot of workshops throughout the English speaking

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world, and is very much recognized. I'm sure many of you out there are aware of her poems. Here's another poem by her in this last book of prose, and it's called: The only legend I have ever loved is the story of a daughter

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THE POMEGRANATE lost in hell and found and rescued there. Love and blackmail are the gist of it. Ceres and Persephone the names And the best thing about th legend is, I can enter i

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anywhere. And have. As a child n exile in a city of fogs a d strange consonants, I read t first and at first, I was n exiled child in the crackl ng dusk of the underworld, he stars blighted. Later, I walk d out in the summer twiligh

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searching for my daughter a bedtime. When she came running I was ready to make any bargai to keep her. I carried her bac past white beams and wasps an honey-scented buddleias. But I was Ceres then and I knew wint r was in store for every leaf

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n every tree on that road. It w s inescapable for each one e passed. And for me. It is win er and the stars are hidden I climb the stairs and stand wh re I can see my child asleep bes de her teen magazines, her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fru

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t. The pomegranate! How di I forget it? She could have c me home and been safe and ended he story and all ur heartbroken searching but he reached out a hand and plucke a pomegranate. She put out er hand and pulled down the Fre

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ch sound for apple and the noise of stone and the proof that even in the place of death, at the heart of legend, in the midst of rocks full of unshed tears, ready to be diamonds by the time the story was told, a child can be hungry. I could warn her.

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There is still a chance. The ain is cold, the road is flin -colored, the suburb has cars nd cable television. The veile stars are above ground. It is another world. But what else an a mother give her daugh er but such beautiful rifts

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in time? If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift. The le end must be hers as well as min . She will enter it. As I have. She will wake up. She will hold he papery flushed skin in her h nd. And to her lips. I will sa nothing.

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And that poem, which is in many ways a re-telling or a re-seeing of the Persephone-Ceres myth in which Ceres watches Persephone descending into hell, not saving herself, of course, being abducted by Hades, that turning of the year endlessly, the

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speaker who I take it is Eavan sees happening again with her daughter and her, but once she was Persephone and now she perceives herself to be Ceres. She can warn her daughter of what is ahead and try to stop the myth but realizes that she

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cannot and that she will say nothing and let her daughter discover the cycles of life herself. I will read well- I'm not going to read that poem. It's too long. But I will read one more poem by Eavan Boland and we will take our break. And

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I have been reading Eavan Boland in honor of St. Patrick's Day. This will be a two part show, the first is the marvelous poet I've just been reading as I said, Eavan Boland, and then we will go to hear the actual voice of Seamus Heaney, the Pulitzer

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Prize winning Irish poet- the Nobel Prize winning Irish poet for 1995 reading from his latest book, after our break. Here is though the last poem I'll read by Eavan Boland, B-O-L-A-N-D: MOTHS

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Tonight the air smells of cut grass, apples rust on the branches. Already summer is a place mislaid between expectation and memory. This has been a summer of moths. Their moment of truth comes well after dark, then they reveal

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themselves at our window, ledges and sills as a pinpoint, a glimmer. The books I look up about them are full of legends: ghosts-swift moths with their dancing assemblies at dusk. Their courtship swarms. How some kinds may steer by the moon. The

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moon is up. The back windows are wide open. Mid-July light fills the neighborhood. I stand by the hedge. Once again, they are near the windowsill, fluttering past the fuchsia and the lavender, which is knee-high and too blue to warn them, they will fall

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down without knowing how or why what they steered by became, suddenly, what they crackled and burned around. They will perish. I am perishing. On the edge and at the threshold of the moment all nature fears and tends towards, the stealing of the

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light. Ingenious, facsimile. And the kitchen bulb which beckons them makes my child's shadow longer than my own. Morton Marcus: And this is the Poetry Show you've been listening to, and I'm going to make some public announcements

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as normal at this time. In the Barnyard Bookstore this coming Friday- well, it's already happened. So, my one announcement will be: stay tuned after the Poetry Show to "From the Bookshelf" hosted by the inimitable Billie Harris, who

00:32:41.880 - 00:32:55.140

will bring us tonight a return visit from local author Susana Herrera, reading from her book, "Mango Elephants in the Sun," which will be in the bookstores in a couple of weeks' time. Susana's book tells about her experiences in the Peace Corps

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in Africa. So, due to that, I will announce that again. This is a St. Patrick's Day evening here on the Poetry Show and I'm going to be reading, I have been reading from one contemporary poet, and will read from another. I've been reading from

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the works of Eavan Boland, that's E-A-V-A-N B-O-L-A-N-D. And I was reading from three books, and the first one was a book of prose that is just really magnificent as she analyzes what the plight of a woman poet in Ireland has been,

00:33:29.610 - 00:33:45.750

and is, and that is called, "Object Lessons: the Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time." Then I read from her "Selected Poems: Outside This Story," all right- or "Outside History," I'm sorry, "Selected Poems, 1980-1990," and ended with, "In

00:33:45.750 - 00:34:08.310

a Time of Violence," her latest book. These are all in paperback, and they are marvelous. Now, I would like to bring you a male Irish poet, and probably the most popular poet around, and that is the 1995 Nobel Prize winner, again,

00:34:08.310 - 00:34:25.320

Irish, and that is Seamus Heaney. And I will read one of the first poems he ever published because it sort of defines who he is and what he is doing. He is a poet of memory, a poet of making life into permanent structures and making

00:34:25.320 - 00:34:39.180

memory into permanent structures. And what we're going to do is, I'm going to read this first poem by him and then we are going to go into a recording of Seamus Heaney reading from his latest book, "The Spirit Level." So here we go. And the

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poem which is the first poem and really shows his relationship to his family and his early life, and the relationship of writing is called: DIGGING

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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

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up twenty years away, stooping in rhythm through potato drills where he was digging. The coarse booth 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

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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 in Toner's bog. Once I carried him milk in a bottle, corked

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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. A cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap of

00:36:10.610 - 00:36:36.860

soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge through living roots awaken in my head. But I've no spade to follow men like them. Between my finger and my thumb, the squat pen rests. I'll dig with it. Seamus Heaney: THE RAIN STICK

00:36:37.890 - 00:36:56.340

Up-end the rain stick and what happens next is a music that you never would have known to listen for. In a cactus stock, downpour, sluice-rush, spillage, and backwash come flowing through. You stand there like a pipe being played by water. You

00:36:56.340 - 00:37:13.650

shake it again lightly, and diminuendo runs through all its scales, like a gutter stopping trickling. And now here comes a sprinkle of drops out of the freshened leaves, then subtle little wets of grass and daisies, then glitter-drizzle,

00:37:14.100 - 00:37:34.590

almost-breaths of air. Up-end the stick again. What happens next is undiminished for having happened once, twice, ten, a thousand times before. Who cares if all the music that transpires is the fall of grit or dry seeds through a cactus? You're like a

00:37:34.590 - 00:37:50.140

rich man entering heaven through the ear of a raindrop. Listen now again. TO A DUTCH POTTER IN IRELAND, this is dedicated to the potter Sonja Landweer.

00:37:52.190 - 00:38:11.750

Then I entered a strongroom of vocabulary where words like urns that had come through the fire, stood in their bone-dry alcoves next a kiln -- and came away changed, like the guard who'd seen the stone move in a diamond-blaze of air or the

00:38:11.750 - 00:38:25.450

gates of horn behind the gates of clay. PART ONE The soil as I knew ran dirty. River sand was the one clean thing that stayed itself in that slabbery, clabbery, wintry,

00:38:25.480 - 00:38:47.620

uddled ground. Until I found ann clay. Like wet daylight or viscous satin under the felt nd frieze of humus layers. Th true diatomite discovered in a ittle sucky hole, grey-blue, du l-shining, scentless, to chable, like the earth's old oi

00:38:47.650 - 00:39:09.040

tment box, sticky and cool. At that stage, you were swimming in the sea or running from it, lu inous with plankton, a nymph of phosphor by the Nor er Zee, a vestal of the goddes Silica, she who is under g ass and glass and ash in the fie

00:39:09.040 - 00:39:29.050

y heartlands of Ceramic . We might have known each ot er then, in that cold gleam-life underground and off the water. Weird twins of puddle, paddle, p t-a-pat, and might have done the small forbidden things -- worked at mud-pies or gone too high o

00:39:29.050 - 00:39:52.390

swings, played "secrets" in t e hedge or "touching tongues" - but did not, in the terri le event. Night after ni ht instead, in the Netherlands, ou watched the bombers kill; th n, heaven-sent, came backlit fr m the fire to war and wartime a

00:39:52.390 - 00:40:16.090

d ever after, every blessed time through glazes of fired quart and iron and lime. And if glaze , as you say, bring down the su , your potter's wheel is bringi g up the earth. Hosannah ex i fernis. Burning wells. Hosannah in clean sand and kaolin and "no

00:40:16.630 - 00:40:37.630

that the right crop waves eside the ruins" in ash-pits, oxides, shards, and chlorophyll . PART TWO, upon translated from the Dutch of J.C. Bloom, called: AFTER LIBERATION

00:40:40.300 - 00:41:01.990

Sheer, bright-shining spring spring as it used to be, cold i the morning, but as broa daylight swings open, th everlasting sky is a marvel t survivors. In a pearly clarit that bathes the fields, thing as they were come back; slo

00:41:01.990 - 00:41:21.430

horses plough the fallow, ar rumbles away in the n ar distance. To have lived it through and now be free to g ve utterance, body and soul - to wake and know every time that it's gone and gone for good the thing that nearly broke yo

00:41:21.430 - 00:41:46.540

-- is worth it all, the five y ars on the rack, the fighting ba k, the being resigned, and not one of the unborn will app eciate freedom like this ever. urning tides, their regularitie ! What is the heart, that it e er was afraid, knowing as it m

00:41:46.570 - 00:42:08.980

st know spring's release, shinin heart, heart constant as a tide? Omnipresent, impertur able is the life that death springs from. And complaint is rong, the slightest complaint a all, now that the rye crop wave beside th

00:42:08.000 - 00:42:30.100

A BRIGID'S GIRDLE Last time I wrote I wrote from a rustic table under magnolias in South Carolina as blossoms fell on me, and the white gable as clean-lined as the prow of a white liner bisected sunlight in

00:42:30.100 - 00:42:47.530

the sunlit yard. I was glad to the early heat, and the first quiet I'd had for weeks. I heard the mocking bird and a delicious, articulate flight of small pickings from a dulcimer like feminine rhymes migrating to the north where you faced the

00:42:47.530 - 00:43:07.660

music and the ache of summer and earth's foreknowledge gathered in the earth. Now it's Brigid's Day and the first snowdrop in County Wicklow, and this, a Brigid's Girdle I'm plaiting for you, an airy fairy hoop (like one of those old crinolines

00:43:07.660 - 00:43:21.730

they'd trindle), twisted straw that's lifted in a circle to handsel and to heal, a rite of spring as strange and lightsome and traditional as the motions you go through going through the thing.

00:43:25.700 - 00:43:43.250

MINT It looked like a clump of small dusty nettles growing wild at the gable of the house beyond where we dumped our refuse and old bottles: unverdant ever, almost beneath notice. But to be

00:43:43.250 - 00:44:05.120

fair, it also spelled promise and newness in the backyard of our life as if something callow yet tenacious sauntered in green alleys and grew rife. The snip of scissor blades, the light of Sunday mornings when the mint was cut and loved: my last

00:44:05.120 - 00:44:25.490

things would be first things slipping from me. If at all things go free that have survived. Let the smells of mint go heady and defenceless like inmates liberated in that yard. Like the disregarded ones we turned against because we'd

00:44:25.490 - 00:44:41.390

failed them by our disregard. A SOFA IN THE 40S All of us on the sofa in a line, kneeling behind each other, eldest down to youngest, elbows going like pistons, for this was

00:44:41.390 - 00:44:59.480

a train and between the jamb-wall and the bedroom door our speed and distance were inestimable. Firstly we shunted, then we whistled, then somebody collected the invisible for tickets and very gravely punched it as carriage after carriage

00:44:59.510 - 00:45:24.560

under us moved faster, chooka-chook, the sofa legs went giddy and the unreachable ones far out on the kitchen floor began to wave. Ghost train? Death gondola? The carved, curved ends, black leatherette and ornate gauntness of it made

00:45:24.560 - 00:45:43.850

it seem the sofa had achieved flotation. Its castors on tip-toe, its braid and fluent backboard gave it airs of superannuated pageantry: when visitors endured it straight-backed, when it stood off on its own remoteness, when

00:45:43.850 - 00:46:04.700

the insufficient toys appeared on it on Christmas mornings, it held out as itself, potentially heaven-bound, earth-bound for sure, among things that might add up or let you down. We entered history and ignorance under the wireless shelf.

00:46:05.630 - 00:46:25.880

Yippee-i-ay sang 'The Riders of the Range' here is the news, said the absolute speaker. Between him and us a great gulf was fixed where pronunciation reigned tyrannically. The aerial wire swept from a treetop down into a hole bored in the

00:46:25.880 - 00:46:47.540

windowframe. When it moved in wind, the sway of language and its furtherings swept and swayed in us like nets in water or the abstract, lonely curve of distant trains as we entered history and ignorance. We occupied our seats with all our

00:46:47.540 - 00:47:06.560

might, fit for the uncomfortableness, constancy was its own reward already. Out in front, on the big upholstered arm, somebody craned to the side, driver, or fireman, wiping his dry brow with the air of one who had run the gauntlet. We

00:47:06.560 - 00:47:24.710

were the last thing on his mind, it seemed; we sensed a tunnel coming up where we'd poured through like unlit carriages through fields at night, our only job to sit, eyes straight ahead, and be transported and make engine noise.

00:47:28.260 - 00:47:47.390

KEEPING GOING, this poem is dedicated to and directed to my brother Hugh. The piper coming from far away is you with a whitewashed brush for a sporran wobbling round you, a kitchen chair upside down

00:47:47.390 - 00:48:05.900

on your shoulder, your right arm pretending to tuck the bag beneath your elbow, your pop-eyes and big cheeks nearly bursting with laughter, but keeping the drone going on interminably, between catches of breath. The whitewash brush. An

00:48:05.900 - 00:48:24.230

old blanched skirted thing on the back of the byre door, biding its time until spring airs spelled lime in a work-bucket and the potstick to mix it in with water. Those smells brought tears to the eyes, we inhaled a kind of

00:48:24.230 - 00:48:45.050

greeny burning and thought of brimstone. But the slope of the actual job of brushing walls, the watery grey being lashed on in broad swatches, then drying out whiter and whiter, all that worked like magic. Where had we come from, what was this kingdom

00:48:45.170 - 00:49:10.460

we knew we'd been restored to? Our shadows moved on the wall and the tar border glittered the full length of the house, a black divide like a freshly opened, pungent, reeking trench. Piss at the gable, the dead will congregate. But separately. The

00:49:10.460 - 00:49:31.760

women after dark, hunkering there a moment before bedtime, the only time the soul was let alone, the only time that face and body calmed in the eye of heaven, buttermilk and urine, the pantry, the housed beasts, the listening bedroom. We were

00:49:31.760 - 00:49:50.780

all together there in foretime, in a knowledge that might not translate beyond those wind-heaved midnights, we still cannot be sure happened or not. It smelled of hill-fort clay and cattle dung. When the thorn tree was cut down you broke your arm.

00:49:51.920 - 00:50:11.090

I shared the dread when a strange bird perched for days on the byre roof. That scene, with Macbeth helpless and desperate in his nightmare -- when he meets the hags again and sees the apparitions in the pot -- I felt at home with that one all

00:50:11.090 - 00:50:29.240

right. Hearth, steam, and ululation, the smoky hair curtaining a cheek. "Don't go near bad boys in that college that you're bound for. Do you hear me? Do you hear me speaking to you? Don't forget!" And then the potstick quickening the

00:50:29.240 - 00:50:51.680

girl, the steam cone swirled everything into it and fierce waved, brightening for a moment, then going down and fatal underway. Gray matter, like [unidentified] old fleck with blood in spatters on the whitewash. Clean spot where his

00:50:51.680 - 00:51:11.900

head had been. Other stains subsumed in the parched wall he lent his back against, that morning like any other morning, park time reservist, toting his lunchbox. A car came slow down Castle Street, made the halt, crossed the diamond, slowed

00:51:11.900 - 00:51:29.510

again, and stopped level with him, although it was not his lift. And then he saw an ordinary face for what it was and the gun in his own face. His right leg was hooked back, his sole and heel against the wall, his right knee propped up

00:51:29.510 - 00:51:52.640

steady, so he never moved, just pushed with all his might against himself, then fell past the tarred strip, feeding the gutter with his copious blood. My dear brother, you have good stamina. You stay on where it happens. Your big tractor pulls

00:51:52.640 - 00:52:10.460

up at the diamond, you wave at people, you shout and laugh above the revs, you keep old roads open by driving on the new ones. You called the piper's sporrans whitewash brushes and then dressed up and marched us through the kitchen, but you

00:52:10.460 - 00:52:29.240

cannot make the dead walk or right wrong. I see you at the end of your tether sometimes, in the milking parlour, holding yourself up between two cows until your turn goes past, then coming to in the smell of dung again and wondering, is this

00:52:29.270 - 00:52:47.810

all? As it was in the beginning, is now and shall be? Then rubbing your eyes and seeing our old brush up on the byre door, and keeping going. TWO LORRIES

00:52:47.000 - 00:53:05.270

It's raining on black coal and warm wet ashes. There are tire-marks in the yard, Agnew's old lorry has all its cribs down and Agnew the coalman with his elfast accent's sweet talking my mother. Would you ever go to a ilm in Magherafelt? But it's r

00:53:05.270 - 00:53:23.120

ining and he still has half t e load to deliver further on. T is time the lode our coal ca e from was silk-black so the a hes will be the silkiest w ite. Magherafelt (via Toomeb idge) bus goes by. The alf-stripped lorry with i

00:53:23.120 - 00:53:42.770

s emptied, folded coal-bags mo es my mother: the tasty ways o a leather-aproned coalman! And films no less! The conceit of coalman. She goes back in and gets out the black lead an emery paper, this 1940s moth r, all business round her

00:53:43.280 - 00:54:00.530

stove, half-wiping ashes with a backhand from her cheek as the bolted lorry gets rev ed and turned and hea s from Magherafelt and t e last delivery. Oh, Magherafe t! Oh, dream of red plush and a city coalman as time fast for

00:54:00.830 - 00:54:19.430

ards and a different lorry g oans into shot, up Broad Street, with a payload that will blow t e bus station to dust and ashes. After that happened, I had a vis on of my mother, a revenant n the bench where I would meet er in that cold-floored waiting

00:54:19.460 - 00:54:38.720

room in Magherafelt, her sho ping bags filled up with sho elled ashes. Death walked pa t her like a dust-faced coa man, refolding body-bags, plyin his load empty upon empty, n a flurry of motes and engine-r vs, but which lorry was it

00:54:39.410 - 00:54:59.600

ow? Young Agnew's or that oth r, heavier, deadlier one, set to explode in a time beyond er time in Magherafelt. So tal y bags and sweet-talk darkne s, coalman. Listen to the ra n spit in new ashes as you he t a load of dust that was

00:54:59.600 - 00:55:20.420

Magherafelt, then reappear from your lorry as my mother's dreamboat coal man filmed in ilk-white ashes. DAMSON Gules and cement dust. A matte tacky blood on the bricklayer's

00:55:20.420 - 00:55:39.680

knuckles, like the damson stain that seeped through his packed lunch. A full hod stood against the mortared wall, his big bright trowel in his left hand (for once) was pointing down as he marvelled at his right, held high and raw: king of the

00:55:39.680 - 00:56:02.000

castle, scaffold-stepper, shown bleeding to the world. Wound that I saw in glutinous colour fifty years ago -- damson as omen, weird, a dream to read -- is weeping with the held-at-arm's-length dead from everywhere and nowhere, here and

00:56:02.000 - 00:56:23.180

now. Over and over, the slur, is scrape and mix as he trowelled and retrowelled and laid down courses of glum mortar. Then the bricks jiggled and settled, tocked and tapped in line. I loved especially the trowel's shine, its edge and apex always

00:56:23.180 - 00:56:42.800

coming clean and brightening itself by mucking in. It looked like but felt heavy as a weapon. If we lifted it there was no strain. It was all pint and skim and float and glisten until he washed and lapped it tight in sacking like a cult blade that

00:56:42.800 - 00:57:01.430

had to be kept hidden. Ghosts with their tongues out for a lick of blood are crowding up the ladder, all unhealed. And some of them still rigged in bloody gear. Drive them back to the doorstep or the road where they lay in their own blood

00:57:01.430 - 00:57:21.950

ones, in the hot nausea and last gasp of dear life. Trowel-wielder, woundie, drive them off like Odysseus and Hades lashing out with his sword that dug the trench and cut the throat of the sacrificial lamb. But not like him -- builder, not

00:57:21.950 - 00:57:41.770

sacker, your shield the mortar board -- drive them back to the wine-dark taste of home, the smell of damsons simmering in a pot, jam, ladled thick and steaming down the sunlight. WEIGHING IN

00:57:43.610 - 00:58:03.200

The fifty-six pound weight. A solid iron unit of negation. Stamped and cast with an inset, rung-thick, moulded, short crossbar for a handle. Squared-off and harmless-looking until you tried to lift it, then a socket-ripping,

00:58:03.290 - 00:58:24.080

life-belittling force -- gravity's black box, the immovable stamp and squat and square root of dead weight yet balance it against another one placed on a weighbridge -- on a well-adjusted, freshly greased weighbridge -- and everything

00:58:24.110 - 00:58:44.150

trembled, flowed with give and take. And this is all the good tidings amount to: this principle of bearing, bearing up and bearing out, just having to balance the intolerable in others against our own, having to abide whatever we settled for

00:58:44.150 - 00:59:04.340

and settled into against our better judgment. Passive suffering makes the world go round. Peace on earth, men of good will, all that holds good only as long as the balance holds, the scales ride steady and the angels' strain prolongs

00:59:04.340 - 00:59:30.170

itself at an unearthly pitch. To refuse the other cheek. To cast the stone. Not to do so some time, not to break with the obedient one you hurt yourself into is to fail the hurt, the self, the igrown rule. Prophecy who struck thee! When soldiers

00:59:30.170 - 00:59:49.190

mocked blindfolded Jesus and he didn't strike back they were neither shamed nor edified, although something was made manifest -- the power of power not exercised, of hope inferred by the powerless forever. Still, for Jesus' sake, do me a favor,

00:59:49.190 - 01:00:10.280

would you, just this once? Prophecy, give scandal, cast the stone. Two sides to every question, yes, yes, yes, but every now and then, just weighing in is what it must come down to, and without any self-exculpation or self-pity.

01:00:11.570 - 01:00:30.650

Alas, one night when follow-through was called for and a quick hit with a fairly rankled, you countered that it was my narrowness that kept me keen, so got a first submission. I held back and I should have drawn blood and that way (mea

01:00:30.680 - 01:00:53.120

culpa) lost an edge. A deep mistaken chivalry, old friend. At this stage only foul play cleans the slate. Morton Marcus: And that was Seamus Heaney reading from his own poems from the latest book he's written, "Spirit Level,"

01:00:53.450 - 01:01:09.020

and he is the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1995. This has been a St. Patrick's Day Program featuring two of the best known Irish poets alive today and that is Seamus Heaney for the second part of our show, and the first

01:01:09.020 - 01:01:28.730

part of our show was Eavan Boland. This is your host Mort Marcus, saying that next week, we are going to pitch and ask you to show your appreciation for the Poetry Show and KUSP. But right now, let me tell you that in thirty seconds or less,

01:01:29.690 - 01:01:44.390

"From the Bookshelf," hosted by the inimitable Billie Harris, will bring us a return visit from local author Susana Herrera, reading from her book, "Mango Elephants in the Sun," and let me say that this is a marvelously beautiful book by a

01:01:44.390 - 01:01:54.200

young member returned from the Peace Corps in Africa. You should listen to her words, they are full of wisdom, innocence, and wonder. See you in three weeks' time.