Seamus Heaney — The Other Side

I Thigh-deep in sedge and marigolds a neighbour laid his shadow on the stream, vouching ‘It’s poor as Lazarus, that ground,’ and brushed away among the shaken leafage: I lay where his lea sloped to meet our fallow, nested on moss and rushes, my ear swallowing his fabulous, biblical dismissal, that tongue of chosen people. When he would stand like that on the other side, white-haired, swinging his blackthorn at the marsh weeds, he prophesied above our scraggy acres, then turned away towards his promised furrows on the hill, a wake of pollen drifting to our bank, nеxt season’s tares. II For days we would rеhearse each patriarchal dictum: Lazarus, the Pharaoh, Solomon and David and Goliath rolled magnificently, like loads of hay too big for our small lanes, or faltered on a rut ‘Your side of the house, I believe, hardly rule by the Book at all.’ His brain was a whitewashed kitchen hung with texts, swept tidy as the body o’ the kirk. III Then sometimes when the rosary was dragging mournfully on in the kitchen we would hear his step round the gable though not until after the litany would the knock come to the door and the casual whistle strike up on the doorstep. ‘A right-looking night,’ he might say, ‘I was dandering by and says I, I might as well call.’ But now I stand behind him in the dark yard, in the moan of prayers. He puts a hand in a pocket or taps a little tune with the blackthorn shyly, as if he were party to lovemaking or a stranger’s weeping. Should I slip away, I wonder, or go up and touch his shoulder and talk about the weather or the price of grass-seed?