I don't think I've posted this before...it's been sitting in my notebook for a while. It was provoked by The Errand, a poem in Seamus Heaney's The Spirit Level.
Inkling
On reading Heaney's "The Errand"
The first time he read the piece,
Big-bearded and paternal,
He saw the trinity of it:
The father with idea, bidding the son do,
And the son seeing the joke in it.
But the spirit, is it most easily
The level itself,
Is it a new tying of the tie,
Or is it more simply, less easily,
The light-filled smile between father and son?
Inkling
On reading Heaney's "The Errand"
The first time he read the piece,
Big-bearded and paternal,
He saw the trinity of it:
The father with idea, bidding the son do,
And the son seeing the joke in it.
But the spirit, is it most easily
The level itself,
Is it a new tying of the tie,
Or is it more simply, less easily,
The light-filled smile between father and son?
Comments
Post a Comment