(Digging with it….)
Our world will never
Witness the death
Of the Naturalist
As long as stones sigh
Trees twit
Rivers rumble
And the road’s serpentine sentence
Is governed by the tortuous syntax
Of lore-ful peregrinations
History’s vigilant nails tattoo
The scaffoldings of waiting habitations
As the hammer sings its song
In thunder and calibrated murmurs
Below a lean, suspenseful sky
Unsure of the temper of the sun
Green memories, green incantations
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Curious rains in search of reluctant roofs
Tendrils dancing to the top of swaying bowers
Between ardent Wisdom and a Kindness
Ever so steady in its communion with the human spirit
Your verse lives on in sound and simmering sense
For yours is the government of the tongue
Of syllables which sometimes saunter into silence
The unsaid which outspeaks the said
Yours, the endless navigation of
That fine line between the necessity of Beauty
And the imperative of Truth. . . .
Farmer-born, peasant-bred
I too hail from the digging clan whose
Harvest laughter succeeds the hoe’s insistence
Hearable throughout in this tribute are hints from Heaney’s iconic essay, “The Government of the Tongue”.