For Seamus Heaney

The Fine Print of Purgatory

Like Seamus Heaney, I was a farmer’s boy

Or rather I became one

When I was four and signed my lease

In hearts’ loss -

Paying my ingoings

In mud and shit and love.

I too saw kittens drown -

And pigs slaughtered

Squealing at hell’s gate,

Blood caught in an old tin bath -

And dogs shot in the drive

Slinking as the 22 rose and leveled.

There can’t be many of us

Who felt white-washed walls

In the dark, as the cows respired -

Smelled the poetry there,

Looking up the stock at night

By torch and latch and moonlight.

Those cattle died of plague

And ended in a bulldozed pit

Near the stack-yard –

And my almost father

Broke his heart for loss

While I was bush-bashing outback tracks.

Few I’m sure will know now

The turnip shredder in the picture

Or have eaten a slice cold from the handle swing.

Now and again, we used to feed turnips

To my Connemara pony Jonty

Before he was knackered by a winter’s standing.

There is cruelty then in much remembering -

But life it was in deeds that dated

With death foreshadowed in a codicil.