There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.
Richard Ellman & Seamus Heaney
As I’ve mentioned before, Seamus Heaney is one of my favorite poets. On the rare night that I have a free moment, I like to look flip through books of poetry that I haven’t touched in too long.
I read this one night last week, and it made me cry. It’s that stunning. lv, molly
by Seamus Heaney
I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o’clock our neighbors drove me home.
In the porch I met my father crying–
He had always taken funerals in his stride–
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.
The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand
And tell me they were “sorry for my trouble,”
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand
In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.
Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,
Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four foot box, a foot for every year.
Thanks to my friend Lauren over at Food E., I re-read “Oysters” — one of my favorite Seamus Heaney poems — for the thousandth time and was as delighted, troubled, and enthralled as I was the first time I read it. You can practically feel the texture of an oyster, the violence that’s inherent in shucking them, and the contrast between the darkness of the oysters’ harvest and the fond, gluttonous memories we create as we eat them.
Really, it’s quite a violent poem [see the second stanza]. The oysters are powerless against the ocean and humans, and their consumption (it almost sounds like rape) is associated with privileged classes. But there’s also some beautiful imagery in the poem that causes me to pause and think about what I consume in the world and how much respect I afford the natural world when I consume.
I think what I gleam from this poem, the idea that’s stuck with me since my first reading of it, is the idea of eating deliberately and mindfully that appears in the first and last stanzas– of thinking about the history of what we’re eating, feeling its taste and texture in our mouths, how it’s related to the natural world, all the while acknowledging the bonds that are forged as we eat. Most importantly, eating deliberately means understanding how what you eat affects the natural world. What do you take away from this poem? xo, m
Our shells clacked on the plates.
My tongue was a filling estuary,
My palate hung with starlight:
As I tasted the salty Pleiades
Orion dipped his foot into the water.
Alive and violated,
They lay on their bed of ice:
Bivalves: the split bulb
And philandering sigh of ocean
Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.
We had driven to that coast
Through flowers and limestone
And there we were, toasting friendship,
Laying down a perfect memory
In the cool of thatch and crockery.
Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow,
The Romans hauled their oysters south of Rome:
I saw damp panniers disgorge
The frond-lipped, brine-stung
Glut of privilege
And was angry that my trust could not repose
In the clear light, like poetry or freedom
Leaning in from sea. I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.
