cúisle mo chroí

So said Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney last night, in reference to his being inspired to write “A Sofa in the Forties,” a poem about the Holocaust train into Auschwitz. Last night I took Max to see Heaney’s poetry reading at Hunter College, where he was awarded an honorary doctorate. It was nice to hear him start with that–both the poem and the idea that everyone is connected to what happens in other places (a sentiment that he also expressed in his Nobel speech in ‘95 and elsewhere no doubt).

Short of the misguided comment by the HC president with regard to the “40 years of violence between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland” it was a great event, and I was so happy to hear Heaney read from his work live, and to take Max with me. Heaney read a few poems including A Sofa in the Forties, Anything Can Happen, The Tollund Man and Oysters. This was Max’s first experience with Heaney, and he was particularly taken by “Oysters,” being that it is about food and is quite beautiful (as well as the fact that Ireland is the only place in the world where you can still get wild oysters!!). Heaney said that he used to escape “the shadow of assassinations, killing and intimate violence” in the North (albeit guiltily) to harvest the oysters with his friends when he was young…

Here’s the text of the poem:

Oysters
by Seamus Heaney

Our shells clacked on the plates.
My tongue was a filling estuary,
My palate hung with starlight :
As I tasted the salty Pleiades
Orion dipped his foot into the water.

Alive and violated,
They lay on their beds of ice :
Bivalves: the split bulb
And philandering sigh of ocean.
Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.

We had driven to that coast
Through flowers and limestone
And there we were, toasting friendship,
Laying down a perfect memory
In the cool of thatch and crockery.

Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow,
The Romans hauled their oysters south to Rome :
I saw damp panniers disgorge
The frond-lipped, brine-stung
Glut of privilege

And was angry that my trust could not repose
In the clear light, like poetry or freedom
Leaning in from sea. I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.