Holding the whole thing in your mind – the sweet, the trite, the silly, the disturbing, the fearsome, the horrific.  Not in an orderly organized list. In the jumbled state in which you experience life. Finding a way to express the jumble because there’s really nothing  you can do about it other than to say: here it is, my take on the glorious, horrible mess.

*

Poems. By Seamus Heaney. Two of them, this morning.

2. Cassandra

No such thing

as innocent

bystanding.

 

Her soiled vest,

her little breasts,

her clipped, devast-

ated, scabbed

punk head,

the char-eyed

 

famine gawk –

she looked

camp-fucked

 

and simple,

People

could feel

 

a missed

trueness in them

focus,

 

a homecoming,

in her dropped-wing,

half-calculating

 

bewilderment.

No such thing

as innocent.

 

Old King, Cock-

of-the-walk

was back,

 

King Kill-

the-Child-

and-Take-

 

What-Comes,

King Agamem-

non’s drum-

 

balled, old buck’s

stride was back.

And then her Greek

 

words came,

a lamb

at lambing time,

 

bleat of clair-

voyant dread,

the gene-hammer

 

and  tread

of the roused god.

And a result-

 

ant shock desire

in bystanders

to do it to her

 

there and then.

Little rent

cunt of their guilt:

 

in she went

to the knife,

to the killer wife,

 

to the net over

her and her slaver,

the Troy reaver,

 

saying, ‘a wipe

of the sponge,

that’s it.

 

The shadow-hinge

swings unpredict-

ably and the light’s

 

blanked out.’

*

 

The First Words

 

The first words got polluted

Like river water in the morning

Flowing with the dirt

Of blurbs and the front pages.

My only drink is meaning from the deep brain,

What the birds and the grass and the stones drink.

Let everything flow

Up to the four elements,

Up to water and earth and fire and air.

From the Romanian of Marin Sorescu

Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level, Faber and Faber 1996