Poet’s Corner- Seamus Heaney Passes

On The Passing Of Seamus Heaney

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman (nee Francis Riley)

A word. He came from the land of poets, porridge, potatoes, publicans, paupers, prayers, pissers and peat, the well-known eight p’s (a ninth, protestants, will be left unspoken). He spoke the mother tongue, nay, the grandmother’s tongue never quite the King’s and then time passing the Queen’s English but that surly brogue that bespoke of ancient sorrows, ancient oppressions, ancient dreams against the hard seas surrounding dear mother. Grandmother too (and not just grandmother in her generation either) defiant against vanilla Americanization, against some lost old sod memory. And so DNA-wired her sprawl learned, prosaic and poetic both, the swirl of language, the twisting of a word upon the tongue, the delight in catching just the right breeze of a phrase as it passes in some bay (always some bay present, these were a sea-bound, sea-faring people, if only to diaspora) drifting back across the seas.

And not just of flailed language but of other sights, smells and sounds, and ancient clan customs. The white sheets, pillow cases, towels, underwear (men’s) flying in the back porch triple-decker wind trying to make due for the umpteenth time although one and all can almost see though the hand wrung bleached whiteness of the things. The smell of oatmeal bread fresh baked from Ida’s Bakery (really the downstairs part of a house converted of necessity into a money-producing operation), and Friday buns (yes, yes, Lenten hot-cross buns I hadn’t forgotten). The no smell of the boiled dinner (non- descript meat, yes, yes ,potatoes, cabbage and so on, boiled to perdition by the time the damn thing boiled got boiled down anyway). The smell of whiskies, cheap low-shelf whiskies to make the pennies go farther, and of stouts and ales too when whiskey credits were short. The smell of sullen sunrise church (Roman Catholic, naturally) all dank and foreboding, faint wisps of wine sand incense left from some past ceremony, filled with wonder about hell, heaven and that hope, the high hope of purgatory as a way-station,

Spoke too of eight hundred year oppressions and scratching on hard rock earth. Of 1916, and shame, and the boys in the north, and never quite get the whole thing settled. Of keeping one own consult, also known as not airing the family’s line in public unlike those sheets flailing away on the back porch. Above all spoke of the “squawlie” net-work that ran amok over every tenement block and kept the whole wide world informed, informed not in the language of the poet by the way. As so Seamus Heaney too passes.