A great writer with a great heart has passed.
Being one of our own, I grew up with his poetry.
His is a great loss.
This has always been my most favourite of his poems.
May he rest easy......
BYE-CHILD
When the tilley lamp glowed,
A yolk of light
In their back window,
The child in the outhouse
Put his eye to a chink -
Little henhouse boy
Sharp-faced as new moons
Remembered, your photo still
Glimpsed like a rodent
On the floor of my mind,
Little moon man,
Kenneled and faithful
At the foot of the yard,
Your frail shape luminous,
Weightless, is stirring the dust,
The cobwebs, the musts
From droppings dried under the roosts
And dead smells from slops
Slipped in through the trap-door
By your mother and keeper.
Until they arrived
With warrants and cameras
Framing his life,
Crusading into that grief,
He had spoken no word.
How to speak for him?
Vigils, solitudes, fasts,
Unchristened tears,
His puzzled love of the light.
He speaks for me at last
With his elusive mime
Of something beyond patience,
His speechless obvious proof
Of those lunar distances
Travelled beyond love.
Seamus Heaney
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