for Michael Longley
We didn’t know of your passing the other day
but the star Venus – guiding you from here –
was outshining the sun, no torches needed
on our midnight visit to the horse next door.
Then every created thing was holding its breath,
it seemed, in anticipation of the storm Éowyn –
the worst ever known – your going disrupting
the planets, maybe – Heaney, Mahon, Homer
shaking your hand, no time by human dates
any more, Achilles re-affirming how your works
and stories constitute your afterlife, your father
his wound from The Great War at last healed,
your twin brother – all stand around embracing you
in turn. You can relax now in the soft armchair
in Sarah’s painting, reside in her interiors, breathe in
her garden flowers while the fragile snowdrops
on your beloved Angel Hill hang their heads lower
than usual as they begin to show themselves,
mourning yet celebrating your unbroken life –
as if every day you were married again to Edna.
In Carrigskeewaun the otters, dolphins, snipe, hares,
badgers will continue as if nothing has happened.
Yet the waves will recite your work like one long poem,
tide by tide, season by season, compelling us all
to listen. And on the rock you chose for your epitaph
the inscription will be one nobly-deserved word ‘Poet’.
Patricia McCarthy edited Agenda poetry journal for more than 20 years. She won the British National Poetry Competition in 2013. A pamphlet of new poems is due later this year from Dare-Gale Press as well as a new collection Around the Mulberry Bush from Waterloo Press
We didn’t know of your passing the other day
but the star Venus – guiding you from here –
was outshining the sun, no torches needed
on our midnight visit to the horse next door.
Then every created thing was holding its breath,
it seemed, in anticipation of the storm Éowyn –
the worst ever known – your going disrupting
the planets, maybe – Heaney, Mahon, Homer
shaking your hand, no time by human dates
any more, Achilles re-affirming how your works
and stories constitute your afterlife, your father
his wound from The Great War at last healed,
your twin brother – all stand around embracing you
in turn. You can relax now in the soft armchair
in Sarah’s painting, reside in her interiors, breathe in
her garden flowers while the fragile snowdrops
on your beloved Angel Hill hang their heads lower
than usual as they begin to show themselves,
mourning yet celebrating your unbroken life –
as if every day you were married again to Edna.
In Carrigskeewaun the otters, dolphins, snipe, hares,
badgers will continue as if nothing has happened.
Yet the waves will recite your work like one long poem,
tide by tide, season by season, compelling us all
to listen. And on the rock you chose for your epitaph
the inscription will be one nobly-deserved word ‘Poet’.
Patricia McCarthy edited Agenda poetry journal for more than 20 years. She won the British National Poetry Competition in 2013. A pamphlet of new poems is due later this year from Dare-Gale Press as well as a new collection Around the Mulberry Bush from Waterloo Press
