Personal Helicon

Personal Helicon
By Seamus Heaney

for Michael Longley

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

Listen to Personal Helicon:
http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/audio/heaney/personal_helicon.mp3

Passer Mortuus Est

As it is April, which is poetry month and the month in which I was born, I thought it fitting to start a blog dedicated to my favorite poems and poets. I thought it would be interesting to get others perspectives on these works too. I have recently been reading the works of Edna St. Vincent Millay, who was introduced to me by my oldest daughter and who I have now found quite interesting to read and so to dedicate the site I share Passer Mortuus Est.

Passer Mortuus Est

Death devours all lovely things:
Lesbia with her sparrow
Shares the darkness - presently
Every bed is narrow.

Unremembered as old rain
Dries the sheer libation;
And the little petulant hand
Is an annotation.

After all, my erstwhile dear,
My no longer cherished,
Need we say it was not love,
Just because it perished?

-Edna St. Vincent Millay