Seamus Heaney Poetry Bot

Posts quotes every half hour from a selection of the mod's favourite Heaney poems (Digging, Triptych, Casualty, Funeral Rites). Created by @gh0stycr0w

[Seamus Heaney Poetry Bot @heaneybot]

[ Other bots made by the mod: https://t.co/hXW1PCXz28]

[Seamus Heaney Poetry Bot @heaneybot]

behind me.
And always, in a corner,
the coffin lid,
its nail-heads dressed

[Seamus Heaney Poetry Bot @heaneybot]

Dawn-sniffing revenant,
Plodder through midnight rain,
Question me again.

[Seamus Heaney Poetry Bot @heaneybot]

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

[Seamus Heaney Poetry Bot @heaneybot]

Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away

[Seamus Heaney Poetry Bot @heaneybot]

He had gone miles away
For he drank like a fish
Nightly, naturally
Swimming towards the lure
Of warm lit-up places,
The blurred mesh and murmur
Drifting among glasses
In the gregarious smoke.

[Seamus Heaney Poetry Bot @heaneybot]

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

[Seamus Heaney Poetry Bot @heaneybot]

in tainted rooms,
their eyelids glistening,
their dough-white hands
shackled in rosary beads.

[Seamus Heaney Poetry Bot @heaneybot]

Their puffed knuckles
had unwrinkled, the nails
were darkened, the wrists
obediently sloped.

[Seamus Heaney Poetry Bot @heaneybot]

On Devenish I heard a snipe
And the keeper’s recital of elegies
Under the tower. Carved monastic heads
Were crumbling like bread on water.

[Seamus Heaney Poetry Bot @heaneybot]

purring family cars
nose into line,
the whole country tunes
to the muffled drumming

[Seamus Heaney Poetry Bot @heaneybot]

My tongue moved, a swung relaxing hinge.
I said to her, ‘What will become of us?’
And as forgotten water in a well might shake
At an explosion under morning

[Seamus Heaney Poetry Bot @heaneybot]

But my tentative art
His turned back watches too:
He was blown to bits
Out drinking in a curfew
Others obeyed, three nights
After they shot dead
The thirteen men in Derry.

[Seamus Heaney Poetry Bot @heaneybot]

the great chambers of Boyne,
prepare a sepulchre
under the cupmarked stones.
Out of side-streets and bye-roads

[Seamus Heaney Poetry Bot @heaneybot]

Sometimes, on the high stool,
Too busy with his knife
At a tobacco plug
And not meeting my eye,
In the pause after a slug
He mentioned poetry.

[Seamus Heaney Poetry Bot @heaneybot]

the procession drags its tail
out of the Gap of the North
as its head already enters
the megalithic doorway.

[Seamus Heaney Poetry Bot @heaneybot]

The line lifted, hand
Over fist, cold sunshine
On the water, the land
Banked under fog: that morning
I was taken in his boat,

[Seamus Heaney Poetry Bot @heaneybot]

Now as news comes in
of each neighbourly murder
we pine for ceremony,
customary rhythms:

[Seamus Heaney Poetry Bot @heaneybot]

On Boa the god-eyed, sex-mouthed stone
Socketed between graves, two-faced, trepanned,
Answered my silence with silence.
A stoup for rain water. Anathema.

[Seamus Heaney Poetry Bot @heaneybot]

the cud of memory
allayed for once, arbitration
of the feud placated,
imagining those under the hill

[Seamus Heaney Poetry Bot @heaneybot]

On Devenish I heard a snipe
And the keeper’s recital of elegies
Under the tower. Carved monastic heads
Were crumbling like bread on water.