Poetry

Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication

For Mary Heaney

I. Sunlight

There was a sunlit absence.
The helmeted pump in the yard
heated its iron,
water honeyed

in the slung bucket
and the sun stood
like a griddle cooling
against the wall

of each long afternoon.
So, her hands scuffled
over the bakeboard,
the reddening stove

sent its plaque of heat
against her where she stood
in a floury apron
by the window.

Now she dusts the board
with a goose’s wing,
now sits, broad-lapped,
with whitened nails

and measling shins:
here is a space
again, the scone rising
to the tick of two clocks.

And here is love
like a tinsmith’s scoop
sunk past its gleam
in the meal-bin.

By Seamus Heaney
From “North”, 1975

© Seamus Heaney

To cite this section
MLA style: Poetry. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023. Wed. 4 Oct 2023. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1995/8422-poetry/>

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