Heaney, Seamus: Glanmore Sonnets II

Sensings, mountings from the hiding places,

Words entering almost the sense of touch,

Ferreting themselves out of their dark hutch –

‘These things are not secrets but mysteries,’

Oisin Kelly told me years ago

In Belfast, hankering after stone,

That connived with the chisel, as if the grain,

Remembered what the mallet tapped to know.

Then I landed in the hedge-school of Glanmore

And from the backs of ditches hoped to raise

A voice caught back off slug-horn and slow chanter

That might continue, hold, dispel, appease:

Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground,

Each verse returning like the plough turned round.