Dear Mr. Heaney
I wish I'd read your poetry
years ago when I was still impressionable and coy and all that jazz.
Now it resounds in my skull, leaving a tingle in my right hand.
My pen is somewhat snug, but a revolver, no.
Ink and shovels aren't far from each other,
so your point is well-taken. In fact, they're co-workers –
Ink's proved itself just as deadly. It slowly ushers men into the earth,
their soil-seat, while the shovel stages the unending play;
the eternal lattice.
The Nobel hung above your head,
the vast array of pins, medals, papers with your name in billowing scarlet.
What a treat. Like the last cupcake in the back of
the refrigerator that had too much chocolate icing and was only
semi-covered in multi-colored snowflakes. I'd loved to have
personally presented it to you. There'd be my own plaque,
billowing scarlet and all. It'd say, "Mr. Heaney,
, you must own a *****." I hope you'd laugh, and not be offended,
thinking me a distasteful and insensitive lout. It may not be right,
but I can't help but steal the volumes surrounding yours out of
every **** library so
"Seamus Heaney"
may catch the eye of the common passerby
more easily. I think I even went to work on
enhancing a spine with a red sharpie once.
Red hits the eye hard.
That was in the central library downtown.
Don't tell anyone.
Beyond a laugh, what I hope for most is that you get this letter.
Just look at it.
Wonder why someone so far removed in age and culture and place
would ever think of you holding an over-frosted desert as glorious.

The Harvest Bow

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 *****
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.

by Seamus Heaney