“The Clothes Shrine” by Seamus Heaney

The Clothes Shrine

It was a whole new sweetness

In the early days to find

Light white muslin blouses

On a see-through nylon line

Drip-drying in the bathroom

Or a nylon slip in the shine

Of its own electricity — 

as if Saint Brigid once more

Had rigged up a ray of sun

Like the one she’d strung on air

To dry her own cloak on

(Hard-pressed Brigid, so

Unstoppably on the go) –

The damp and slumped and unfair

Drag of the workaday

Made light of and got through

As usual, brilliantly.

Image: Photo of clothes on line (close-up) by Manu B on Unsplash.

Audio: Listen to Seamus Heaney reading his poem here.

“A Brigid's Girdle - for Adele” & “Brigid’s Girdle” by Séamus Heaney

A Brigid's Girdle - for Adele

 

Last time I wrote I wrote from a rustic table
Under magnolias in South Carolina
As blossoms fell on me, and a white gable
As clean-lined as the prow of a white liner

Bisected sunlight in the sunlit yard.
I was glad of the early heat and the first quiet
And a delicious, articulate

Flight of small plinkings from a dulcimer
Like feminine rhymes migrating to the north
Where you faced the music and the ache of summer
And earth's foreknowledge gathered in the earth.

Now it's St Brigid's Day and the first snowdrop
In County Wicklow, and this a Brigid's Girdle
I'm plaiting for you, an airy fairy hoop
(Like one of those old crinolines they'd trindle),

Twisted straw that's lifted in a circle
To handsel and to heal, a rite of spring
As strange and lightsome and traditional
As the motions you go through going through the thing.

Brigid’s Girdle

On St Brigid’s Day, the new Life could be entered
By going through her girdle of Straw rope:
the proper way for men was right leg first,
Then right arm and right shoulder,
Head then left
Shoulder, arm and leg,
Women drew it down
Over the body and stepped out of it
The open they came into by these moves
Stood opener, hoops came off the world,
They could feel the February air
Still soft above their heads and imagine
The limp rope fray and flare like wind-borne gleanings
Or an unhindered goldfinch over ploughland

Note: From the “Crossings” Collection by Séamus Heaney

Image: "looping rope on plain background" by Kier in Sight Archives. From Unsplash. CC2.0 Modified to black and white by Mael Brigde.

"The Forge" by Seamus Heaney

Not exactly a Brigit poem, but as goddess of smithcraft, she certainly has a hand in here.

Seamus Heaney. My hero.

The Forge

by Seamus Heaney

All I know is a door into the dark.
Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;
Inside, the hammered anvil’s short-pitched ring,
The unpredictable fantail of sparks
Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.
The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,
Horned as a unicorn, at one end and square,
Set there immoveable: an altar
Where he expends himself in shape and music.
Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose,
He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter
Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows;
Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and flick
To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.

1969

BBC Radio Ulster's "Your Place and Mine" features a clip on the man who inspired "The Forge". Find it here:

The Forge

On this week’s programme, we pay tribute to the late Barney Devlin - the blacksmith who inspired the famous poem by Seamus Heaney.

Photo: Blacksmith Stephen Quinn, from Craft in Ireland.

For more on the blacksmith in Ireland and Stephen Quinn, read The Tuam Herald "Iron, art and inspiration & keeping the blacksmith's craft alive", by Tony Galvin.