a not unwelcoming Emptiness

Here's a favourite Seamus Heaney poem of mine, as taken from the pictured 2010 collection ...

... such a powerful lament for loss; but one shot through with warm, emotive memories and ultimately a lack of fear:


'The door was open and the house was dark'

The door was open and the house was dark
Wherefore I called his name, although I knew
The answer this time would be silence

That kept me standing listening while it grew
Backwards and down and out into the street
Where as I’d entered (I remember now)

The streetlamps too were out
I felt, for the first time there and then, a stranger,
Intruder almost, wanting to take flight

Yet well aware that here there was no danger,
Only withdrawal, a not unwelcoming
Emptiness, as in a midnight hangar

Or an overgrown airfield in high summer.

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Seamus Heaney (1939 – 2013)

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