A year since Seamus Heaney left us, I share the house with his voice: an old tape—yes, a tape recording—of a reading he made as long ago as the eighties, I think. Its Anne Walshs tape, and it is my honour to have safe keeping of it, and it was she who woke from a pool of sleep where she is to suggest that tonight would be the night for me to sit with its syllables again, and how can it be that a strip of tape in a clear plastic cartridge has survived with his voice on it, and yet he—the house this voice inhabited and the mind these poems swam up into from the clear water pooled under the earth—is not? Well, tonight in Balmain in the rain, he is, and I am with him. Seamus Heaney has reawaken to revel in the spirit/ They strengthened when they chose to put me down/ For their own good. And he is not lost to you and yours, though he, in the form he took among us, has passed unregistered into the virtual city of the Dead. Here he is beside me, in Anahorish again, and listening out for the sedge warbler, and looking in wells, and laughing with a kind embarrassment, and there, outside, I hear his axe-thumps...splitting firewood; and here is his voice, the best thing of all, the ring of it, sweet as a bell, and it rings as long as this tape holds our, as long as we read him, as long as we can remember to listen as tenderly as he did to cattle out in rain, their knowledgeable/ Solid standing and readiness to wait. He will be with us as long as we learn from him to learn from where we find ourselves what it is we can most usefully say and do.
Posted on: Sat, 30 Aug 2014 13:39:55 +0000
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