The Poetic Foot

It's the lifted foot I love on this fine Mr. Wigeon! 

This snow only lasted three days, 

Now there are only a few heaps of "remaining snow" 

which is a kigo (haiku season word) 

for late winter or very early spring. 

I think is is one of the very poignant kigo 

like "autumn deepens" or "spring melancholy" 

which are two of my very favorite season words..

The Backward Look

A stagger in air

as if a language

failed, a sleight

of wing.

A snipe's bleat is fleeing

its nesting ground

into dialect,

into variants,

transliterations whirr

on the nature reserves --

little goat of the air,

of the evening.

little goat of the frost.

It is his tail-feathers

drumming elegies

in the slipstream

of wild goose

and yellow bittern

as he corkscrews away

into the vaults

that we live off, his flight

through the sniper's eyrie,

over twilit earthworks

and wall-steads,

disappearing among 

gleanings and leavings

in the combs

of a fieldworker's archive.

Seamus Heaney

Wintering Out, Faber and Faber, 2011

Kindle location 269.

I was thinking about Seamus Heaney tonight because of a recent article "re-evaluating" his poetry. That's that writer's code for "devaluing" the work of this fine Nobel Prizewinning poet. And I say, "Balderdash!" So I went looking for something birdish to go with my duck. I am getting more and more poetry on my Kindle and finding it useful to have it so handy. 

I like the way this poem drapes itself handily across the four-line stanza; it is even willing to begin a stanza without a capital letter!