Uploaded on July 13, 2011
When you have nothing more to say, just drive
For a day all around the peninsula.
The sky is tall as over a runway,
The land without marks so you will not arrive.
But pass through, though always skirting landfall.
At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill,
The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable
And you’re in the dark again. Now recall
The glazed foreshore and silhouetted log,
That rock where breakers shredded into rags,
The leggy birds silted on their own legs,
Islands riding themselves out into the fog
And drive back home, still with nothing to say
Except that now you will uncode all landscapes
By this: things founded clean on their own shapes,
Water and ground in their extremity.
–Seamus Heaney
Ireland in Poetry
edited by Charles Sullivan
7.13.2023: This isn’t Ireland, but so what?
“Islands riding themselves out into the fog” is a great line.