Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit. There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. And so, my fellow graduates, make the world before you a better one by going into it with all boldness. You are up to it and you are fit for it; you deserve it and if you make your own best contribution, the world before you will become a bit more deserving of you.

~ From his remarks to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill graduates, May 12, 1996

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Dear Seamus,

It’s eight years since you left us, and I want you to know your poems are still with me, old friends that show up to catch my heart off-guard and blow it open. I never had the chance to tell you in person how much I loved the words that scored so many episodes of my life.  So in a recurring and imaginary conversation,  the two of us are standing at the bus-stop down the road from Barney’s Forge. The rain has started again, and the 110 bus is late. I’m glad. All “happed up” in your duffel coat, you – our Laureate – remark on the drizzle. Colloquial, your voice reminds me of my father’s. I agree and, before it is too late, I find inadequate words to thank you . . .

. . .  for every time I was braver and bolder because of something you had written; for the way you schooled me to love from afar the language and the graveled lanes of Castledawson and Bellaghy and the bluebells at the edge of the fields; for showing me how to “credit marvels” in the unlikeliest and smallest of  things; and, for nudging me to set down words on a page or light up a screen with them, so I might one day be able, “to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.”

In the very worst of times, cleaved in two by loss, I turned to you because only your words worked  – certain and sure. I remember when you died, we were all a bit lost, struck by a collective realization that only you would be capable of producing the words that would even begin to assuage Ireland’s sorrow over your passing.  Somebody even said that your death left a breach in the language itself. Only you. You always had the right word right when I needed it, when I was caught again in limbo – Incertus – between faith and doubt, a rock and a hard place, fear and wonder, magic and loss – like Van Morrison’s 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 has always been one of my favorites – all the more since finding out it was a favorite of yours too and that back in 2009, when asked to choose a poem or two that would exemplify your lifetime 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.

You never looked back.

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

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, you left what was needed –  simple and spare, a forward-looking reassurance. As you had told us once before, that “it is important to be reassured.”

Thanks again, Seamus.  I am reassured and looking forward. I am  walking on air.

For that, I am forever in your debt.

Codladh sámh.

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