Wednesday, January 1, 2014
Heaney: "Like Heroes in a Barrow"
IN GALLARUS ORATORY
You can still feel the community pack
This place: it’s like going into a turfstack,
A core of old dark walled up with stone
A yard thick. When you’re in it alone,
You might have dropped, a reduced creature,
To the heart of the globe. No worshipper
Would leap up to his God off this floor.
Founded there like heroes in a barrow,
They sought themselves in the eye of their King
Under the black weight of their own breathing.
And how he smiled on them as out they came,
The sea a censer and the grass a flame.
--Seamus Heaney
(Thank you, RA, for the reminder this first day of the year.)