Oracle by Seamus Heaney

Hide in the hollow trunk
of the willow tree,
its listening familiar,
until, as usual, they
cuckoo your name
across the fields.
You can hear them
draw the poles of stiles
as they approach
calling you out:
small mouth and ear
in a woody cleft,
lobe and larynx
of the mossy places.

The Harvest Bow by Seamus Heaney

As you plaited the harvest bow
You implicated the mellowed silence in you
In wheat that does not rust
But brightens as it tightens twist by twist
Into a knowable corona,
A throwaway love-knot of straw.

Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks
And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of game cocks
Harked to their gift and worked with fine intent
Until your fingers moved somnambulant:
I tell and finger it like braille,
Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable,

And if I spy into its golden loops
I see us walk between the railway slopes
Into an evening of long grass and midges,
Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges,
An auction notice on an outhouse wall–
You with a harvest bow in your lapel,

Me with the fishing rod, already homesick
For the big lift of these evenings, as your stick
Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes
Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes
Nothing: that original townland
Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand.

The end of art is peace
Could be the motto of this frail device
That I have pinned up on our deal dresser–
Like a drawn snare
Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn
Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm.

Irish Poetry by Billy Collins

That morning under a pale hood of sky

I heard the unambiguous scrape of spackling

against the side of our wickered, penitential house.

The day mirled and clabbered

in the thick, stony light,

and the rooks’ feathered narling

astounded the salt waves, the plush coast.

I lugged a bucket past the forked

coercion of a tree, up toward

the pious and nictitating preeminence of a school,

hunkered there in its gully of learning.

Only later, by the galvanized washstand,

while gaunt, phosphorescent heifers

swam beyond the windows,

did the whorled and sparky gib of the indefinite

wobble me into knowledge.

Then, I heard the ghost-clink of milk bottle

on the rough threshold

and understood the meadow-bells

that trembled over a nimbus of ragwort—

the whole afternoon lambent, corrugated, puddle-mad.