Machine-gun posts defined a real stockade.

There was that white mist you get on a low ground

And it was déjà-vu, some film made

Of Stalag 17, a bad dream with no sound.

Is there a life before death? That’s chalked up

In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,

Coherent miseries, a bite and sup:

We hug our little destiny again.

from Singing School

1 The Ministry of Fear

for Seamus Deane

Well, as Kavanagh said, we have lived

In important places. The lonely scarp

Of St Columb’s College, where I billeted

For six years, overlooked your Bogside.

I gazed into new worlds: the inflamed throat

Of Brandywell, its floodlit dogtrack,

The throttle of the hare. In the first week

I was so homesick I couldn’t even eat

The biscuits left to sweeten my exile.

I threw them over the fence one night

In September 1951

When the lights of houses in the Lecky Road

Were amber in the fog. It was an act

Of stealth.

Then Belfast, and then Berkeley.

Here’s two on’s are sophisticated,

Dabbling in verses till they have become

A life: from bulky envelopes arriving

In vacation time to slim volumes

Despatched ‘with the author’s compliments’.

Of your exercise book, bewildered me –

Vowels and ideas bandied free

As the seed-pods blowing off our sycamores.

I tried to write about the sycamores

And innovated a South Derry rhyme

With hushed and lulled full chimes for pushed and pulled.

Those hobnailed boots from beyond the mountain

Were walking, by God, all over the fine

Lawns of elocution.

Have our accents

Changed? ‘Catholics, in general, don’t speak

As well as students from the Protestant schools.’

Remember that stuff? Inferiority

Complexes, stuff that dreams were made on.

‘What’s your name, Heaney?’

‘Heaney, Father.’

‘Fair

Enough.’

On my first day, the leather strap

Went epileptic in the Big Study,

Its echoes plashing over our bowed heads,

But I still wrote home that a boarder’s life

Was not so bad, shying as usual.

On long vacations, then, I came to life

In the kissing seat of an Austin 16

Parked at a gable, the engine running,

My fingers tight as ivy on her shoulders,

A light left burning for her in the kitchen.

And heading back for home, the summer’s

Freedom dwindling night by night, the air

All moonlight and a scent of hay, policemen

Swung their crimson flashlamps, crowding round

The car like black cattle, snuffing and pointing

The muzzle of a Sten gun in my eye:

‘What’s your name, driver?’

‘Seamus…’

Seamus?

They once read my letters at a roadblock

And shone their torches on your hieroglyphics,

‘Svelte dictions’ in a very florid hand.

Ulster was British, but with no rights on

The English lyric: all around us, though

We hadn’t named it, the ministry of fear.

2. A Constable Calls

2 A Constable Calls