Walking on Air.

Twelve years since he left us, the poems are still here, old friends that show up like Facebook memories to catch my heart off-guard and blow it open.

I never had the chance to thank Seamus Heaney in person for the words that scored so many episodes of my life, but in a recurring daydream, the two of us are standing at the bus-stop at The Hillhead, just down the road from Barney’s Forge. It’s started to rain, and  the 110 bus is late. I’m glad.

All “happed up” in his duffel coat, our Laureate remarks on the drizzle. Colloquial, his voice sounds like my father’s. Lilting. Rural.  I say something typical about the rain and before the bus comes, I find inadequate words to thank him

. . .  for all the times I was braver and bolder because of something he had written; for the way he schooled me to love from afar the language and the graveled lanes of Castledawson and Bellaghy, the bluebells and blackberries in the heart of the forest, the sound of the Moyola River rushing under the old bridge; for showing me how to “credit marvels” in the unlikeliest and smallest of  things; and, for nudging me to set my own words down on a page or light up a screen with them, so one day I might just be able, “to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.“

In the very worst of times, wrecked by grief, only Heaney’s words worked—certain and sure.

When he died, we were all a bit lost, struck by a collective realization that only he would have been capable of producing the words to assuage a whole country’s sorrow over his passing. 

I remember somebody saying that his death left a breach in the language itself.

He always ad the right word right when I needed it, when I was caught again in limbo, between faith and doubt, a rock and a hard place, fear and wonder, magic and loss—a dweller on the threshold.

If you have the words . . . there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way.

Today,  I am pulled back again to “The Underground.”  It’s one of my favorites, even more so since finding out it was a favorite of Heaney’s too and that once —when he was asked to choose a poem or two that would exemplify a lifetime of achievement in poetry—,The Underground” was one of them.

The Underground

There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,
You in your going-away coat speeding ahead
And me, me then like a fleet god gaining
Upon you before you turned to a reed

Or some new white flower japped with crimson
As the coat flapped wild and button after button
Sprang off and fell in a trail
Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.

Honeymooning, moonlighting, late for the Proms,
Our echoes die in that corridor and now
I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones
Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons

To end up in a draughty lamplit station
After the trains have gone, the wet track
Bared and tensed as I am, all attention
For your step following and damned if I look back.

He never looked back.

When I heard that his final words were in Latin, in the form of a text to his wife from his hospital bed, I thought of his Orpheus in the Underworld:

Noli Timere.

Just two words from an ancient world illuminating a tiny dark space— “Be not afraid.”

No longer the shy and fretting young poet who signed his first poems Incertus, he left what was needed —simple and spare, a forward-looking reassurance.  Confident. As he had reminded us once before,  “it is important to be reassured.”

Thank you, Seamus Heaney.  I am reassured and looking forward. I am walking on air.

For that, I am forever in your debt.