And catch the heart off guard and blow it open

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other

So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,

Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it

More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

Seamus Heaney, from 'The Spirit Level'

A river in the trees

Listening to the wind in the trees, especially during this beautiful leaf-falling season here, being amazed at hearing the sound of water up above - one of my favourite things.

The riverbed, dried-up, half-full of leaves.
Us, listening to a river in the trees.

Seamus Heaney, The Haw Lantern (Faber and Faber 1987)

http://firstknownwhenlost.blogspot.in/2016/02/two-lines.html

Closeness

Wept on reading this one. This is exactly the kind of thing you keep storing away in your head all the time, precious wordless moments of communion and ease, amidst the utterly ordinary....

Clearances
(in memoriam M.K.H, 1911-1984)

When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water,
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each others work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives -
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

Seamus Heaney

Shared by Jean, who has heard Seamus Heaney reciting this himself.