Seamus Heaney — The Strand at Lough Beg

In Memory of Colum McCartney All round this little island, on the strand Far down below there, where the breakers strive Grow the tall rushes from the oozy sand. --Dante, Purgatorio, I, 100-3 Leaving the white glow of filling stations And a few lonely streetlamps among fields You climbed the hills toward Newtownhamilton Past the Fews Forest, out beneath the stars-- Along the road, a high, bare pilgrim's track Where Sweeney fled before the bloodied heads, Goat-beards and dogs' eyes in a demon pack Blazing out of the ground, snapping and squealing. What blazed ahead of you? A faked road block? The red lamp swung, the sudden brakes and stalling Engine, voices, heads hooded and the cold-nosed gun? Or in your driving mirror, tailing headlights That pulled out suddenly and flagged you down Where you weren't known and far from what you knew: The lowland clays and waters of Lough Beg, Church Island's spire, its soft treeline of yew. There you used hear guns fired behind the house Long before rising time, when duck shooters Haunted the marigolds and bulrushes, But still were scared to find spent cartridges, Acrid, brassy, genital, ejected, On your way across the strand to fetch the cows. For you and yours and yours and mine fought the shy, Spoke an old language of conspirators And could not crack the whip or seize the day: Big-voiced scullions, herders, feelers round Haycocks and hindquarters, talkers in byres, Slow arbitrators of the burial ground. Across that strand of ours the cattle graze Up to their bellies in an early mist And now they turn their unbewildered gaze To where we work our way through squeaking sedge Drowning in dew. Like a dull blade with its edge Honed bright, Lough Beg half shines under the haze. I turn because the sweeping of your feet Has stopped behind me, to find you on your knees With blood and roadside muck in your hair and eyes, Then kneel in front of you in brimming grass And gather up cold handfuls of the dew To wash you, cousin. I dab you clean with moss Fine as the drizzle out of a low cloud. I lift you under the arms and lay you flat. With rushes that shoot green again, I plait Green scapulars to wear over your shroud.