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Seamus Heaney

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The Wood Road

Resurfaced, never widened.
The verges grassy as when
Bill Pickering lay with his gun
Under the summer hedge
Nightwatching, in uniform –

Special militiaman.

Moonlight on rifle barrels,
On the windscreen of a van
Roadblocking the road,
The rest of his patrol
Sentry-still, in profile,

Guarding Mulhollandstown.

Or me in broad daylight
On top of a cartload
Of turf hand-built and squat
As a drystone beehive hut,
Looked up to, looking down,

Allowed the reins like an adult –

In the picture at last,
The one on the whitewashed wall
Of a horse and cart and turfman
Embroidered on calico
In what they called ‘the long ago’,

Framed in passe-par-tout.

Or that August day I walked it
To the hunger striker’s wake,
Across a silent yard,
In past a watching crowd
To where the guarded corpse

And a guard of honour stared.

Film it in sepia,
Drip-paint it in blood,
This was/is the Wood Road.
Resurfaced, never widened,
The milk-can deck and the sign

For the bus-stop overgrown.

Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland. District and Circle (Faber) is his 12th collection of poems. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.

Page(s) 28

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