(To be read in Heaney’s ‘reading voice’.)

 

My chisel’s cold appraisal

Blunt as an English Master’s stare

Probes the poem for its pith.

 

Non sequiturs stacked neatly

Drying in a metaphoric sun

Supported by a splay of beams.

 

Redundancy is everywhere

Making the poet poorer than Midas

Who dare not spend a penny

Lest the golden flow should stop.

 

Ball-pane blows crack a crust

Of contrived bamboozling.

Verbs are verbiage

Hedged and ditched to his whim

Fresh riven; to shrivel later.

 

God that chisel was cold in my hand!

Cold as my calculating.

 

No ancestor could split syntax as I do.

My granddad was illiterate

My brother only ever learned three words

These he repeated from dawn till dark.

I would invade the local shops

Doing down their syntax on sign-boards.

And having entered the village school

Was soon expelled - for verbosity.

 

The cold of my chisel, its bruising tip,

Bursting the fine capillaries of poetry;

Lay bare the bare-faced hokum

Asking the ultimate question.

 

Is this a poem?

And do I, at Seamus, have dig with it?