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| photo by Larry Herman from "Seven Modern Poets" |
What with the wind bending the long grasses
Of memory we climb the cut above the loves
Of our making and our unmaking,
Walking the grades guarded by faith and desire
Where the freights used to run belching black smoke,
Iron gods setting fire to the weeds,
A burning dividing the then from what's followed,
Now at the top of the hill with the tracks torn up,
Surveying our losses, nothing so dear
As wading waist deep with the smiles of another
When the wind shows its face in the way of our passing,
All we ever wished for, and nothing has changed.
—Seamus Heaney, his wife Marie, and their children, 1972.
