Heaney Whispers

by Erik Richardson

Sitting in the Dublin airport where runways left

a surgical scar in the midst of green-bellied fields

the country stares at me through Heaney’s eyes

through time. His picture whispers from the terminal wall

of railway children and telegraph wires

slightly out of place here. The whispers

move on through, me waiting like others before for a plane

with scalpel wings to sever me, history.

As the wings slice, peat-black shadows

bleed out to pool under me under crumbled ruins

unhealed and held in place

by rain and dark, by vigilant sheep, tangled

with winding roads

themselves cut through time

through the midst of green-bellied fields

~ originally published in Chiron Review