Funeral, and Seamus Heaney

When I was a young person I had a boyfriend, and we went about with his friends, who as a gang were punky and interested in drugs. One of the gang, big Pete, took too many drugs (really a lot) and developed schizophrenia, and after that he was not able to settle to anything. He was also an alcoholic. And after many years, he died of cirrhosis of the liver and heart failure, and yesterday our gang was reunited for his funeral. There were tears; he died young. Pete had written a great many poems (surprisingly religious) and he wanted them published, so we are going to choose some and put them on a website. I am to be helped in this by a Prof of Literature, who did not take too many drugs, thank the Lord.

So yesterday we were protagonists in our own story, and then I came home and in that context we are not the protagonists but really, the scene painters, the back-room boys who pay the tax, the catering people, whilst the young people take the stage; a strange adjustment.

Seamus Heaney has died; I was moved to send one of his poems to my exbf because it was about grief, and he replied that they were fellows of the same college, Magdalene, Cambridge. He did not say anything about the poem, which was a disappointment, but that's not his subject. I am sad that I know only one person who is intelligently interested in poetry.

He was a great poet and Irishman. Very much loved. He wrote this one for his grandsons.

A Kite for Michael and Christopher

All through that Sunday afternoon

A kite flew above Sunday,

A tightened drumhead, an armful of blown chaff.

I’d seen it grey and slippy in the making,

I’d tapped it when it dried out white and stiff,

I’d tied the bows of newspaper

Along its six-foot tail.

But now it was far up like a small black lark

And now it dragged as if the bellied string

Were a wet rope hauled upon

To lift a shoal.

My friend says that the human soul

Is about the weight of a snipe

Yet the soul at anchor there,

The string that sags and ascends,

Weighs like a furrow assumed into the heavens.

Before the kite plunges down into the wood

And this line goes useless

Take it in your two hands, boys, and feel

The strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.

You were born fit for it.

Stand in here in front of me

And take the strain.