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Seamus Heaney
1939-2013
"Bogland"
for T. P. Flanagan
- We have no prairies
- To slice a big sun at evening –
- Everywhere the eye concedes to
- Encrouching horizon,
- Is wooed into the cyclops' eye
- Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
- Is bog that keeps crusting
- Between the sights of the sun.
- They've taken the skeleton
- Of the Great Irish Elk
- Out of the peat, set it up
- An astounding crate full of air.
- Butter sunk under
- More than a hundred years
- Was recovered salty and white.
- The ground itself is kind, black butter
- Melting and opening underfoot,
- Missing its last definition
- By millions of years.
- They'll never dig coal here,
- Only the waterlogged trunks
- Of great firs, soft as pulp.
- Our pioneers keep striking
- Inwards and downwards,
- Every layer they strip
- Seems camped on before.
- The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
- The wet centre is bottomless.
© Seamus Heaney
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