-Interruption-

Tonight, it's Seamus Heaney, — a poem

Written of his younger self away at school,

Informed of the accidental death of his brother,

A child of four years.

Arriving to the deep   

Distress at the porch to his house

The old men gathered there

Are rising to their feet, shaking his hand,

Sorry for his troubles.

Then in the midst of Heaney's heart-beat,

The cold phosphorescence of television intrudes 
With its cunning seduction and the reading is paused.

It will be an hour

Before I find my way back

To "Mid-Term Break" —

An hour to the atmosphere

Greying heavily

Folding layer on layer —

An hour to the child

Gauze-swaddled by nurses
Carried to the house in funeral steps,

The child thrown clear of the thresher's
Rattling bumper — (was as if

The seed's husk bruised his head) –– 

An hour to find my way to the porch once again

Where a cradle is rocking with life anew, 

Where a mother mourns grief sick

For the loss of her child four years and done,

And upon the bed in the silent upstairs room

Candles and snowdrops grace the little coffin;

"A four foot box, a foot for every year."