Summer 1969 -- Seamus Heaney

While the Constabulary covered the mob   

Firing into the Falls, I was suffering

Only the bullying sun of Madrid.

Each afternoon, in the casserole heat

Of the flat, as I sweated my way through   

The life of Joyce, stinks from the fishmarket   

Rose like the reek off a flax-dam.

At night on the balcony, gules of wine,

A sense of children in their dark corners,

Old women in black shawls near open windows,   

The air a canyon rivering in Spanish.

We talked our way home over starlit plains   

Where patent leather of the Guardia Civil   

Gleamed like fish-bellies in flax-poisoned waters.

‘Go back,’ one said, ‘try to touch the people.’   

Another conjured Lorca from his hill.

We sat through death-counts and bullfight reports   

On the television, celebrities

Arrived from where the real thing still happened.

I retreated to the cool of the Prado.   

Goya’s ‘Shootings of the Third of May’   

Covered a wall—the thrown-up arms   

And spasm of the rebel, the helmeted   

And knapsacked military, the efficient   

Rake of the fusillade. In the next room,

His nightmares, grafted to the palace wall—

Dark cyclones, hosting, breaking; Saturn   

Jewelled in the blood of his own children,   

Gigantic Chaos turning his brute hips   

Over the world. Also, that holmgang

Where two berserks club each other to death   

For honour’s sake, greaved in a bog, and sinking.

He painted with his fists and elbows, flourished

The stained cape of his heart as history charged.

 

 

British troops in Belfast, 1969