Listening to the lady on Radio four,
The continuity announcer,
Announcing a discontinuity,
Seamus Heaney, she said,
'Who recently died'.
Something in the way she spoke those words,
The stress and emphasis, slightly obtuse,
Made it sound,
Like yet another achievement,
For the great man of words,
Like He had picked up,
Yet another award,
Yet another prize winning poem.
Like it was simply the last thing to do,
On his to do list.
And it strikes me that this, in itself, is inherently poetic,
Leaving them hanging, like that.
That death, for a poet, is a stepping off,
Of the final page,
A dot, dot, dot,
If you will.
footprints trail,
Just occasionally it is a precise and full, stop.
I heard a man once say,
In a church building,
stripped of images,
and full of words,
That we are God's poem.
Words into flesh,
and back to words
I like to think, Dear Seamus,
that he had just finished a verse...
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