Anahorish

Seamus Heaney, the great Irish poet of mud and muck, is dead. No better tribute than to cite a few of his many haunting lines, these from his poem “Anahorish”:

My ‘place of clear water,’

the first hill in the world

where springs washed into

the shiny grass

and darkened cobbles

in the bed of the lane.

Anahorish, soft gradient

of consonant, vowel-meadow,

after-image of lamps

swung through the yards

on winter evenings.