-Breath of air-

Heaney spoke to Hughes, in part,

At the memorial service for Hughes;

—I am the least of poetry’s children.—

I liked that and decided someday

To lift it, with all the obligatory maskings,
For use in one of my own poems.

I am the least of poetry's children.

Here and there, stones are put into place.

Other stones sit atop these and still others
Will form the finishing capstones.

In another direction,
An emerald-coated moss

Clings to the bark of a tree

Which branches outward

Yielding leaves and in winter

Yields the truth of its geometry.

Atop the lay of this Dartmouth farmland,

Weeds protrude from between the stones
Of a wall built longer ago than my earliest years.
The weeds move upward and outward in an act
Of stubborn behavior.

It’s a puzzle of fragments, poetry is and the words
Cling together and build upon one another
And the phrasing spreads outward in its imagery and

Sometimes it all just happens as fundamentally as this.