Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Tuesday Poem | The Peninsula by Seamus Heaney

  
Images captured this weekend whilst driving out on our peninsula. No explanation needed re; why I felt prompted to post Seamus Heaney's poem again. . .  






              The Peninsula

               When you have nothing more to say, just drive
               For a day all around the peninsula.
               The sky is tall as over a runway,
               The land without marks, so you will not arrive

               But pass through, though always skirting landfall.
               At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill,
               The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable
               And you're in the dark again. Now recall

               The glazed foreshore and silhouetted log.
               That rock where breakers shredded into rags,
               The leggy birds stilted on their own legs,
               Islands riding themselves out into the fog.

               And drive back home, still with nothing to say
               Except that now you will uncode all landscapes
               By this: things founded clean on their own shapes,
               Water and ground in their extremity. 



               Seamus Heaney 
                      from his collection Door Into The Dark







This week's editor on the Tuesday Poem hub is TP curator, Mary McCallum 
with Digging in the garden after dark (written - it just so happens - for the late and much loved Seamus Heaney)
by Pat White


                              this morning the blade bites clean
                              through soil turning up, on the way
                              worms, spiders and a surfeit of others
                              at work in the everlasting dark

                              the news is it is your turn to spend
                              some time with them, nothing is ended
                              changing places perhaps, . . . 



For this and other Tuesday Poem offerings, please click on the quill.



2 comments:

  1. In this and your previous post - and posts further in the past - I love the eloquence of your photography. In some cases the wholly different perspective of something we may know at ground level. With others, myth and reality of fog. I find these to be days unlike any I have known before, as though a life-long (seemingly) skirmish with self has reached a turning point, as though someone just introduced me to electricity or I saw the ocean for the first time, wonder on that scale, yet with a density of mandate. That is as close as I come in this moment. The sense of change being afoot I feel in your posts. xoxop

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    1. Dear Marylinn - we can trust you to facilitate and synthesise our personal and shared experiences. Like you, I find these days to be unlike any I have known before. We are drawing the map as we travel it, I think. A turning point, yes. A new introduction to electricity, yes. An ever-renewing, ever-expanding relationship to - and with - Wonder. The 'density of mandate', too. Your words are so often torches lighting the way. Thank you xoxo

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