Sunlight

by Seamus Heaney

 

For Mary Heaney

 

There was a sunlit absence.

The helmeted pump in the yard

heated its iron,

water honeyed

 

in the slung bucket

and the sun stood

like a griddle cooling

against the wall

 

of each long afternoon.

So, her hands scuffled

over the bakeboard,

the reddening stove

 

sent its plaque of heat

against her where she stood

in a floury apron

by the window.

 

Now she dusts the board

with a goose's wing,

now sits, broad-lapped,

with whitened nails

 

and measling shins:

here is a space

again, the scone rising

to the tick of two clocks.

 

And here is love

like a tinsmith's scoop

sunk past its gleam

in the meal-bin.

__________

From North, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985.