Seamus

Seamus Heaney was christened Irish –But confirmed a poet:‘When, for fuck’s sake are you going to writeSomething for us?’ the IRA man asked.He knew what it meant for Heaney to be Irish,Don’t you know: Irish enough to hate the prods,Irish enough to be off to Dublin in the green,Not with a tommy gun, but gobs of GaelicOr Latin maybe to acknowledge their tribe.My tribe right or wrong -Dulce et decorum est pro tribo mori.We do not know the tribe and tongueOf the body in the Iron Age bog,But we know, like an Irish man, he diedWith food in his belly and a mind rich in dreams.

And still a question lingers: can a man liveAn inner émigré outside a dream?For after all, in Hitler’s WonderlandThe ones who tried were nailed,Firmly, onto a crooked cross.But Heaney had his cross to bear:His conviction that still a man was a man,Loyal to himself and condemned to knowThat finally, to side with a side in his IrelandWas to side with lies – the truth run out of town,Tarred and feathered.