‘our heartiest welcomer’
Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground.
The mildest February for 20 years
Is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound
Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors.
Our road is steaming, the turned-up acres breathe.
Now the good life could be to cross a field
And art a paradigm of earth knew from the lathe
Of plows. My lea is deeply tilled.
Old plough-socks gorge the subsoil of each sense
And I am quickened with a redolence
Of farmland as a dark unblown rose.
Wait then… Breasting the mist, in sowers’ aprons,
My ghosts come striding into their spring stations.
The dream grain whirls like freakish Easter snows.
--Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), from the “Glanmore Sonnets,” in Field Work, 1979
