Читать книгу This Carting Life - Rustum Kozain - Страница 14

Reading Heaney’s ‘Nerthus’

for S. Ben-Tov

Afternoon sun of Ohio’s August

daubs the classroom with early rust.

Eight of us bristle, apprenticed

to nail the world to its sentence.

Poet’s poet, our teacher hands us

a copy each of Heaney’s ‘Nerthus’.

A chill creeps in me as she reads.

From Heaney-soil, that concrete dark,

an unseen ash-fork staked in bog:

my first portents of winter north.

*

We have all heard the name

but not Heaney’s Great Chain of Verbs.

We stall. And do not fathom

the quiet mesh of kesh and loaning

that lull and push of middle-voice

that verb say

the long-grained never static

of the poem’s non-finite aesthetic