A friend and colleague shares her birthday with her favourite poet, Seamus Heaney. Earlier this year, when she and I were sharing a sixth form class with whom she had recently studied Heaney's poem 'The Skunk', I wrote an affectionate parody of the poem, to mark the birthday and make the class laugh.
I'm posting it here now, in affectionate tribute to 'Famous Seamus', who died last week. Heartbreaking now, to consider that that birthday turned out to be Heaney's last.
There once was a poet called Heaney,
Who couldn't get his poems to rhyme...
THE POET
Old, severe, greyed and bespectacled like Wilde’s Mr Chasuble
In the comedy, Famous Seamus The Great
Paraded the Poet’s poems. Lesson after lesson
They crept onto the syllabus.
The pupils groaned into silence.
My board light flickered above the desk.
Medium-sized students felt blueness in blue uniforms.
There was future tense tension of exam rooms.
After sixteen years I was teaching
Heaney’s poetry again, approaching the poet
Like a peat bog, as if his buried meanings
Were hinted between lines and behind backs
Of examiners. The fascinating, endless
Trans-tangential drift spelt focus’ absence.
The aftermath of an afternoon of marking
Anticipated despairings on a cold results day.
And there he was, so wise and sonorous,
Ordinary in his tweed suit, yet glamorous,
Anthologised, deconstructed,
Slurping a cup of tea 160 miles south of us.
It will all come back to me tomorrow, stirred
By thinking of the Poet blowing out his birthday candles,
Head-down, tail-up, leaning over the flickering cake,
Like his students plunge-lining for a bog-deep meaning…
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