To Anna Quinn (1)

Stranger:  What kind your people are
	        I would wish to know:
	        Round-shouldered men like rolling-stock
	        Great in despair
	        Simple in prayer
	        And their hard hands tear
	        The clay on the rock
	        Where the plough cannot go?

No charlatan am I
With poets mouth and idiot's eye.
I may not be divine
But what is mine is mine
In naked honesty.

(The girl in the Lending Library)

You leaned your head
On the bookshelf
And I saw your perpendicular eyes,
Like the sword at Orion's Belt,
Swing from a Lending Library shelf

Under Orion I was born,
Viva-la for Nora Criona!

You leaned your head
Against the shelf
And I saw your sided eyes
Like the sword at Orion's Belt
In the south-passionate skies.

Plough take your thin arms from about my middle
Leave me free to unscroll the wisdom of other flesh.

Upon a bank I sat a child made seer
Of one fair primrose flowering in my mind:
Better than love it is, said I, to find
One small page of God's manuscript made clear.

To be a poet and not know the trade
To be a lover and repel all women
Twin ironies by which great saints are made
The agonising pincer-jaws of Heaven

Realize the touch kingdom
Do not stray
In the abstract temple of love
There are no priests on the altars
Of Metaphysic

You have heard this truth before
Well what matter!

My black hills have never seen the sun rising
Eternally they look north towards Armagh
Lot's wife would not be salt if she had been
Incurious as my black hills that are happy
When dawn whitens Glassdrummond chapel

My hills hoard the bright shillings of March
Till the sun searches the last pocket
They are my Alps and I have climbed the Matterhorn
With a sheaf of hay for the cattle many a time.

Around me everywhere
People are saying
The hard-edged words of reality.
They are praying
To a solid god whose kick is no illusion
And whose house
Is not a poet's corner of confusion.