Good Friday

Lyrical and profound, as ever from Heaney. (And I just love the inclusion of the moon here -  how unusual, but fitting, as we see.)


Westering - Seamus Heaney

I sit under Rand McNally’s
'Official Map of the Moon’—
The colour of frogskin,
Its enlarged pores held

Open and one called
‘Pitiscus’ at eye level—
Recalling the last night                                                                                                                               In Donegal, my shadow

Neat upon the whitewash
From her bony shine,
The cobbles of the yard
Lit pale as eggs.

Summer had been a free fall
Ending there,
The empty amphitheatre
Of the west. Good Friday

We had started out
Past shopblinds drawn on the afternoon,
Cars stilled outside still churches,
Bikes tilting to a wall;

We drove by,
A dwindling interruption,
As clappers smacked
On a bare altar

And congregations bent
To the studded crucifix.
What nails dropped out that hour?
Roads unreeled, unreeled

Falling light as casts
Laid down
On shining waters.
Under the moon’s stigmata

Six thousand miles away,
I imagine untroubled dust,
A loosening gravity,
Christ weighing by his hands.