A Further Advancement of Learning
after Seamus Heaney
I too have watched a world go,
falling behind another, where
my father’s canvas piece-bag was
not hung, in shoulderless disrepair,
on the back of an unopening door.
A stillness that broke before
the last wooden hulls slipped their
deadweights beneath the Firth’s mass.
I watched that world with care
passing faster than I could know.
I will not forget trying on
my father’s shoes, or having opened
the retired toolchest, finding angles
acute with readiness for one who lived
still within him. He too had been
there to watch a world go, had seen
how the returning men no longer fitted
their pre-war overalls, the buckles
on the dungarees would need replaced
and their taut pride had gone.
No son really follows his father
but all try, at least once, to bear
themselves as the men they had seen
shaping the world before them to their
undoubting will. We all fall at first
when the walk is not our walk, but fast
we find our style and swagger to where
we see an end to what had been.
The world I saw going is still there
behind the birth of another.
Page(s) 52
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The