The Ministry of Fear

Well, as Kavanagh said, we have lived In important places. The lonely scarp Of St Columb’s College, where I billeted For six years, overlooked your Bogside. I gazed into new worlds: the inflamed throat Of Brandywell, its floodlit dogtrack, The throttle of the hare. In the first week I was so homesick I couldn’t even eat The biscuits left to sweeten my exile. I threw them over the fence one night In September 1951 When the lights of houses in the Lecky Road Were amber in the fog. It was an act Of stealth. Then Belfast, and then Berkeley. Here’s two on’s are sophisticated, Dabbling in verses till they have become A life: from bulky envelopes arriving In vacation time to slim volumes Despatched `with the author’s compliments’. Those poems in longhand, ripped from the wire spine Of your exercise book, bewildered me— Vowels and ideas bandied free As the seed-pods blowing off our sycamores. I tried to write about the sycamores And innovated a South Derry rhyme With hushed and lulled full chimes for pushed and pulled. Those hobnailed boots from beyond the mountain Were walking, by God, all over the fine Lawns of elocution. Have our accents Changed? ‘Catholics, in general, don’t speak As well as students from the Protestant schools.’ Remember that stuff? Inferiority Complexes, stuff that dreams were made on. ‘What’s your name, Heaney?’ ‘Heaney, Father.’ ‘Fair Enough.’ On my first day, the leather strap Went epileptic in the Big Study, Its echoes plashing over our bowed heads, But I still wrote home that a boarder’s life Was not so bad, shying as usual. On long vacations, then, I came to life In the kissing seat of an Austin 16 Parked at a gable, the engine running, My fingers tight as ivy on her shoulders, A light left burning for her in the kitchen. And heading back for home, the summer’s Freedom dwindling night by night, the air All moonlight and a scent of hay, policemen Swung their crimson flashlamps, crowding round The car like black cattle, snuffing and pointing The muzzle of a Sten gun in my eye: ‘What’s your name, driver?’ ‘Seamus …’ Seamus? They once read my letters at a roadblock And shone their torches on your hieroglyphics, ‘Svelte dictions’ in a very florid hand. Ulster was British, but with no rights on The English lyric: all around us, though We hadn’t named it, the ministry of fear.