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Sing a song of sixpence, A pocket full of rye; Four-and-twenty blackbirds Baked in a pie. When the pie was opened The birds began to sing; Wasn't that a dainty dish To set before a king?

Sing a song of sixpence, A pocket full of rye, Four and twenty blackbirds Baked in a pie. When the pie was opened The birds began to sing— Wasn't that a dainty dish To set before the king? The king was in the counting-house Counting out his money, The queen was in the parlor Eating bread and honey, The maid was in the garden Hanging out the clothes. Along came a blackbird And snipped off her nose.

Has the bright sun set, Has the gale grown stronger? Still we’ll not grieve yet: We will sing a while longer! Has our youth been met By Time the wronger? Let us not grieve yet, Let us sing a while longer! Is the world beset, Do the sorrows throng her? Let us not grieve yet: Let us sing a while longer!

Sing me a song of a lad that is gone, Say, could that lad be I? Merry of soul he sailed on a day Over the sea to Skye. Mull was astern, Rum on the port, Eigg on the starboard bow; Glory of youth glowed in his soul; Where is that glory now? Sing me a song of a lad that is gone, Say, could that lad be I? Merry of soul he sailed on a day Over the sea to Skye. Give me again all that was there, Give me the sun that shone! Give me the eyes, give me the soul, Give me the lad that's gone! Sing me a song of a lad that is gone, Say, could that lad be I? Merry of soul he sailed on a day Over the sea to Skye. Billow and breeze, islands and seas, Mountains of rain and sun, All that was good, all that was fair, All that was me is gone.

VII Sing the song of the moment in careless carols, in the transient light of the day; Sing of the fleeting smiles that vanish and never look back; Sing of the flowers that bloom and fade without regret. Weave not in memory’s thread the days that would glide into nights. To the guests that must go bid God-speed, and wipe away all traces of their steps. Let the moments end in moments with their cargo of fugitive songs. With both hands snap the fetters you made with your own heart chords; Take to your breast with a smile what is easy and simple and near. Today is the festival of phantoms that know not when they die. Let your laughter flush in meaningless mirth like twinkles of light on the ripples; Let your life lightly dance on the verge of Time like a dew on the tip of a leaf. Strike in the chords of your harp the fitful murmurs of moments.

For Ethan Canin I sat on the dock at dusk and spoke to the fish who swam beneath me like ears with fins to hear my secrets. “That words come close?” I whispered. “The sky enters me like a sword with my own hand on the hilt. How to witness what I can't express— the smell of lilacs, the dirge of loons. Make up the rest if you wish. Less is enough. Say I sound like one of the Hosts. That I'm crying also and there's nothing you can do to make me stop. That I'm like the peepers, katydids, and thrush with my own song— all call in the opera of dusk. Or is it response?”

They are not angels though they have the hollow look of beings bred on ether. There’s an air of cool removal from your life, the hawk’s indifference to the hare’s terror. You see it in their palms, raised casually against the fresco’s surface, as to glass of submarine or spacecraft, and you see it in their eyes, oracular, that let you pass alone to unknown agony. The song they sing is merely time.

for Boyce They are threatening to leave us          the nimble-throated singers the little murderers with the quick pulses They  perch at the ends of   bare branches          their tails are ragged and pitiful          the long green feathers are fallen out          They  go on eating and eating last autumn's yellow melia berries They do not care that you approach          cold corpses rot in the grass          in the reeds The gray-shouldered crows hobble about          the wren barely a mouthful          cocks her pert tail and threatens to slaughter the white-footed cat in the bushes They do not understand that they are dying They are threatening to leave us          how quickly we forget the way they taught us how to play our voices opening soul to weightlessness          like the Spartan poet singing under the burden of  his old bones to the chorus girls with their honey songs and their holy voices how he wished he could scoot like a kingfisher lightly over the flower of  the waves          who boasted I know the tunes of every bird but I Alcman found my words and song in the tongue of the strident partridge Where will we find songs          when the sleek-headed mallards are gone          who chase each other around the pond the reluctant duck and the lovesick drake The way she turns her head to the side to scold him whack  whack  whack  whack  whack the way her boyfriend chases off  his rival and then swims back reeb  reeb with feeble reassurances          the way he sits on top of  her          the way she flaps her wings to keep above water          the way they look pleased with themselves          wagging their tails          smoothing each feather back in its right place They are threatening to leave          but you may still catch them saying goodbye          stealthed in the cedar and cypress at dawn          in the dark clarity between sleep and waking A run of  five notes on a black flute another          and another          buried deep in the mix how many melodies can the air hold And what they sing          so lovely and so meaningless may urge itself  upon you          with the ache of   something  just beyond the point of  being remembered the trace of a brave thought in the face of sadness

Cold may lie the day, And bare of grace; At night I slip away To the Singing Place. A border of mist and doubt Before the gate, And the Dancing Stars grow still As hushed I wait. Then faint and far away I catch the beat In broken rhythm and rhyme Of joyous feet,— Lifting waves of sound That will rise and swell (If the prying eyes of thought Break not the spell), Rise and swell and retreat And fall and flee, As over the edge of sleep They beckon me. And I wait as the seaweed waits For the lifting tide; To ask would be to awake,— To be denied. I cloud my eyes in the mist That veils the hem,— And then with a rush I am past,-— I am Theirs, and of Them! And the pulsing chant swells up To touch the sky, And the song is joy, is life, And the song am I! The thunderous music peals Around, o'erhead- The dead would awake to hear If there were dead; But the life of the throbbing Sun Is in the song, And we weave the world anew, And the Singing Throng Fill every corner of space—- Over the edge of sleep I bring but a trace Of the chants that pulse and sweep In the Singing Place.

Fair seedtime had my soul, and I grew up Fostered alike by beauty and by fear; Much favoured in my birthplace, and no less In that beloved Vale to which, erelong, I was transplanted ... —WILLIAM WORDSWORTH , The Prelude He [the stable-boy] had a book of Orange rhymes, and the days when we read them together in the hay-loft gave me the pleasure of rhyme for the first time. Later on I can remember being told, when there was a rumour of a Fenian rising, that rifles were being handed out to the Orangemen; and presently, when I began to dream of my future life, I thought I would like to die fighting the Fenians. — W. B. YEATS , Autobiographies 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’. Those poems in longhand, ripped from the wire spine 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 His bicycle stood at the window-sill, The rubber cowl of a mud-splasher Skirting the front mudguard, Its fat black handlegrips Heating in sunlight, the ‘spud’ Of the dynamo gleaming and cocked back, The pedal treads hanging relieved Of the boot of the law. His cap was upside down On the floor, next his chair. The line of its pressure ran like a bevel In his slightly sweating hair. He had unstrapped The heavy ledger, and my father Was making tillage returns In acres, roods, and perches. Arithmetic and fear. I sat staring at the polished holster With its buttoned flap, the braid cord Looped into the revolver butt. ‘Any other root crops? Mangolds? Marrowstems? Anything like that?’ ‘No.’ But was there not a line Of turnips where the seed ran out In the potato field? I assumed Small guilts and sat Imagining the black hole in the barracks. He stood up, shifted the baton-case Farther round on his belt, Closed the domesday book, Fitted his cap back with two hands, And looked at me as he said goodbye. A shadow bobbed in the window. He was snapping the carrier spring Over the ledger. His boot pushed off And the bicycle ticked, ticked, ticked. 3. Orange Drums, Tyrone, 1966 The lambeg balloons at his belly, weighs Him back on his haunches, lodging thunder Grossly there between his chin and his knees. He is raised up by what he buckles under. Each arm extended by a seasoned rod, He parades behind it. And though the drummers Are granted passage through the nodding crowd, It is the drums preside, like giant tumours. To every cocked ear, expert in its greed, His battered signature subscribes ‘No Pope’. The goatskin’s sometimes plastered with his blood. The air is pounding like a stethoscope. 4. Summer 1969 While the Constabulary covered the mob Firing into the Falls, I was suffering Only the bullying sun of Madrid. Each afternoon, in the casserole heat Of the flat, as I sweated my way through The life of Joyce, stinks from the fishmarket Rose like the reek off a flax-dam. At night on the balcony, gules of wine, A sense of children in their dark corners, Old women in black shawls near open windows, The air a canyon rivering in Spanish. We talked our way home over starlit plains Where patent leather of the Guardia Civil Gleamed like fish-bellies in flax-poisoned waters. ‘Go back,’ one said, ‘try to touch the people.’ Another conjured Lorca from his hill. We sat through death-counts and bullfight reports On the television, celebrities Arrived from where the real thing still happened. I retreated to the cool of the Prado. Goya’s ‘Shootings of the Third of May’ Covered a wall—the thrown-up arms And spasm of the rebel, the helmeted And knapsacked military, the efficient Rake of the fusillade. In the next room, His nightmares, grafted to the palace wall— Dark cyclones, hosting, breaking; Saturn Jewelled in the blood of his own children, Gigantic Chaos turning his brute hips Over the world. Also, that holmgang Where two berserks club each other to death For honour’s sake, greaved in a bog, and sinking. He painted with his fists and elbows, flourished The stained cape of his heart as history charged. 5. Fosterage for Michael McLaverty ‘Description is revelation!’ Royal Avenue, Belfast, 1962, A Saturday afternoon, glad to meet Me, newly cubbed in language, he gripped My elbow. ‘Listen. Go your own way. Do your own work. Remember Katherine Mansfield—I will tell How the laundry basket squeaked