Wednesday, August 19, 2009

AT ARDBOE POINT by Seamus Heaney


Right along the lough shore
A smoke of flies
Drifts thick in the sunset.

They come smattering daintily
Against the windscreen,
The grill and bonnet whisper

At their million collisions:
It is to drive thought
A hail of fine chaff.

Yet we leave no clear wake
For they open and close on us
As the air opens and closes.

To-night when we put out our light
To kiss between sheets
Their just audible siren will go

Outside the window,
Their invisible veil
Weakening the moonlight still further

And the walls will carry a rash
Of them, a green pollen.
They’ll have infiltrated our clothes by morning.

1 comment:

  1. You're missing the rest of it:
    If you put one under a lens
    You'd be looking at a pumping body
    With such outsize beaters for wings
    That this visitation would seem
    More drastic than Pharaoh's -
    I'm told they're mosquitoes
    But I'd need forests and swamps
    To believe it
    For these are our innocent, shuttling
    Choirs, dying through
    Their own live empyrean, troublesome only
    As the last veil on a dancer.

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