Seeing Things in Seamus Heaney

i.

The tattered artificer
had his way
would build a honey comb shrine
with words like bees becoming light
spectral casting
on the cave wall.

ii.

My brother sat versus Seamus Heaney
on a plane to Ireland
My son and I saw him
on the lecture stage at Harvard
We tracked and traced him
But never met him at
The Field.
Had pints anyway
you take what
you can
Along the way.

iii.

Seamus cadged
a stone
from my ear
and it in his palm displayed
He dropped the ink
in the water boys
and poked you with a poem
you know
the stuff
jumped off
the page.

iv.

There was "this woman who sat for years
in a wheelchair, looking straight ahead"
and it evinced a neighbor
walking to worship o'er.

Betty in rouge
She'd trudged gingerly
to Saturday 4oclock mass
old brown coat forwardly
she was leaning
toward praying.

vi.

There was 'Blessed be down to earth!
Blessed be highs!" that popped my pa again
into my poor boy's cranium.

My father diving for the fishnet
like a crane in his prime
for the rented net I'd dropped in
Fence Lake
Not going to lose that deposit yet
Not going to be
too harsh
on me, either.

vii.

Recollection embedded:
"when you swing a loaded basket"

A ga-zillion chestnuts I remember
Gathered in a red wagon
Under a gigantic tree
I cant pay you boys said
the Lutheran woman
We didn’t care
But what to do with them?

viii.

There's more. What's more?
There's a cavernous store!
Seamus leaving mellifluous words to glide
swan like exploding
in our buzzing pond

Saying
Hey, I was here
Adroitly exploding
Yet swanlike unto
old Ireland.
                          -Jack Vaughan, Sept 2013