— for Seamus Heaney*
Forging scaffold and wells of tongue,
Whose every word— rung to the stars,
One sprite, born a new heart to Ulster,
Tanged in sounds of the beating sparkle,
Now the leftover sun, a light in absence,
Falls with leaves of the turning autumn,
Tears, sloping, in a feathered arc, so fair,
Splitting to the shores of a western isle.
The Celtic Otherworld (orbis alius, so named after Lucan's account of the druidical doctrine of metempsychosis) is a concept in Celtic mythology, referring to an Otherworld such as a realm of the dead and a home of the deities or spirits.
Tales and folklore describe it as Fortunate Isles in the western sea, or at other times underground (such as in the Sídhe mounds) or right alongside the world of the living, but invisible to most humans.