RIP Seamus Heaney, 1939-2013

He lived there in the unsayable lights.
He saw the fuchsia in a drizzling noon,
The elderflower at dusk like a risen moon
And green fields greying on the windswept heights.
"I will break through," he said, "what I glazed over
with perfect mist and peaceful absences" --
Sudden and sure as the man who dared the ice
And raced his bike across the Moyola River.
A man we never saw. But in that winter
Of nineteen forty-seven, when the snow
Kept the country bright as a studio,
In a cold where things might crystallize or founder,
His story quickened us, a white goose
Heard after dark above the drifted house.

Glanmore Sonnets VI, 1979