The Peninsula

When you have nothing more to say, just drive 

For a day all round the peninsula. 

The sky is tall as over a runway, 

The land without marks, so you will not arrive 

But pass through, though always skirting landfall. 

At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill, 

The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable 

And you’re in the dark again. Now recall 

The glazed foreshore and silhouetted log, 

That rock where breakers shredded into rags, 

The leggy birds stilted on their own legs, 

Islands riding themselves out into the fog, 

And drive back home, still with nothing to say 

Except that now you will uncode all landscapes 

By this: things founded clean on their own shapes, 

Water and ground in their extremity.

– Seamus Heaney (1939- 2013) Northern Irish poet, Nobel Prize winner, Oxford Professor of Poetry, and one of the pre-eminent poets of the 20th century