A
year has now passed since the renowned Irish poet Seamus Heaney died in Dublin
at the end of last summer. He was buried near his family’s grave in the little
country churchyard of St. Mary’s in Bellaghy in his native County Derry,
Northern Ireland. This May, on the first of many pilgrimages to Bellaghy, I
stood beside the resting place of this great but humble man, the spot marked by
a simple wooden cross, his name and dates on a metal plate. It was tucked into a
corner of the churchyard, the grave capped with a bank of clay and chained off
by small white links. Alone, I read with rueful irony the line, "Each
year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not" from "Blackberry
Picking."
Seamus
Heaney left us on August 30, 2013, texting his last words to his wife: “noli
timere,” Latin for “don’t be afraid.” I find a comfort of sorts in the thought
that Heaney was himself unafraid of what lay before him as death approached. Now,
a year later, many continue to feel his loss but know that in his silence, his
verse is with us still. How can I enter a church anywhere, anytime, after
reading his “Poor Women in a City Church” without seeing “bright asterisks on
brass candlesticks:/. . . Blue flames . . . jerking on wicks” or “Old
dough-faced women with black shawls/ Drawn down tight kneel in the stalls”?
“Marble columns and cool shadows/Still them,” he tells us, and “In the gloom
you cannot trace/A wrinkle on their beeswax brows.”
How
can he be gone from us, this Nobel Prize-winning poet, when in his lines we
hear “the squelch and slap/Of soggy peat” as turf is cut from a bog and tossed
up upon the bank in “Digging”? Or when he recalls for us those childhood days
when we traipsed behind our fathers, following in their steps, then live to see
with awful poignancy the roles reversed in “Follower”:
I
was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping
always, but today
It
is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind
me, and will not go away.
How can he not be here, this poet
of grace and truth, who in “Mid-Term Break” is called home from school when his
little brother is struck by a car? He who captures forever the image of his
brother’s coffin: “A four foot box, a foot for every year”?
In
the years to come, each time I return to Ireland I will make the journey to
Drumcliff churchyard outside Sligo Town, as I always do, to pay homage beside
the grave of the poet William Butler Yeats. But I will then drive on up to
County Derry in the North and find my way to the humble country churchyard of
St. Mary’s in Bellaghy. There I will pay tribute to Seamus Heaney. An Irish
friend suggested to me that Heaney’s grave will never attain the pilgrimage
status of Yeats’s final resting place, as Yeats lies beside a main road outside
a major town. One finds himself amidst the remote and lonely backroads leading
to Bellaghy, he told me, only if one has made a particular point of going
there, or if one is lost. Yet I envision a different future altogether for
Heaney’s gravesite. I see a poet’s grave marked by a polished granite headstone
and border to which the people whose lives his words have touched will journey
from near and far alike. They will come alone and in droves to pay tribute to
this poet who lives still in his words, whose voice we still hear.
