On the grass when I arrive,
Filling the stillness with life,
But ready to scare off
At the very first wrong move.
In the ivy when I leave.
It’s you, blackbird, I love.
I park, pause, take heed.
Breathe. Just breathe and sit
And lines I once translated
Come back: “I want away
To the house of death, to my father
Under the low clay roof.”
And I think of one gone to him,
A little stillness dancer –
Haunter-son, lost brother –
Cavorting through the yard,
So glad to see me home,
My homesick first term over.
And think of a neighbour’s words
Long after the accident:
“Yon bird on the shed roof,
Up on the ridge for weeks –
I said nothing at the time
But I never liked yon bird.”
The automatic lock
Clunks shut, the blackbird’s panic
Is shortlived, for a second
I’ve a bird’s eye view of myself,
A shadow on raked gravel
In front of my house of life.
Hedge-hop, I am absolute
For you, your ready talkback,
Your each stand-offish comeback,
Your picky, nervy goldbeak –
On the grass when I arrive,
In the ivy when I leave.
This is a poem about the act of witnessing. Our lives are as much about observation as action and in this poem the poet Seamus Heaney, explores the act of ‘coming home’ through the ironic presence of a blackbird, a creature sometimes associated with being a harbinger of death.
This poem is also witnessed in a way by Heaney’s wonderfully poignant earlier poem, Mid-term Break which specifically examined the death of the poet’s younger brother and was included in the previous AQA Anthology. This meeting of texts and meeting here with the blackbird who we are told, had ironically witnessed the earlier death, reveal how we are all mixed up in each others’ exits and entrances into life and death and we always try to make sense of our world less we slip down into the despairing melancholy of utter absence.
We also ‘see’ ourselves and each other taking part in life and this produces our meanings.If we are all equipped with an inner voice or dialogue, then we are also equipped with an inner camera, a portable ‘eye’ we take wherever we go. Without the act of witnessing which is of course linked to consciousness, is there any being for us at all? Of course life goes on without us we claim to know, but without the consciousness of the witness then what is left? Oblivion presumably if there is no God or deity, or an alternative existence elsewhere, if there is something beyond this place, which as yet we have to trust to the imagination and call it faith.
Heaney’s evocation of his brother’s absence through death, and yet continued presence through memory, is a perfectly compressed elegy to tenderness and love: ‘ A little stillness dancer’. He is always about, haunting the edge of the poet’s consciousness, at the edge of his thoughts and observations, watching him perhaps too, perfectly preserved through time?