Friday 30 August 2013

Seamus Heaney has died...

C and I studied Seamus Heaney's poetry at the OU. This poem, 'When All the Others Were Away At Mass', was guaranteed to have us both welling up every time we read it, laughing at ourselves at the same time for always being so quickly and reliably moved by it. Hearing it again, I'm reminded of one cold, dark, winter's day - I must have been very young because in my mind's eye I'm looking up at my mum - the two of us sitting in front of the coal fire, and my mum cutting potatoes and carrots to drop into a soup pot on the floor between us.

'I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine...'

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