Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit. There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. And so, my fellow graduates, make the world before you a better one by going into it with all boldness. You are up to it and you are fit for it; you deserve it and if you make your own best contribution, the world before you will become a bit more deserving of you.

~ From his remarks to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill graduates, May 12, 1996

Dear Seamus Heaney,

Six years since you left us, I want to let you know your poems are still with me, all those well-crafted words showing up like old friends who catch my heart off-guard and blow it open. I often wish I’d had the chance to let you know in person, that one day, maybe at the bus-stop down the road from Barney’s Forge, our paths would cross. All “happed up” in your duffel coat, you would remark on the weather – something colloquial that would remind me of the way my father speaks –  and I would agree and then weave in a thank you before it was too late.

I would thank you for all those times I was braver and bolder because of something you had written, and for the way you schooled me to love from afar the language and graveled lanes of Castledawson and Bellaghy.  I would thank you for showing me how to “credit marvels” in the unlikeliest small things, and for nudging me to set down words on a page or light up a screen with them, so I might one day be able, “to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.” But the opportunity eluded me.

My Mother’s Bookshelf – By Sophie

Over the years, during the worst of times for those I love and who love me, when I didn’t know what to say, I would turn to your pitch-perfect poetry and wrap up my condolences in your certain sure words.  When you died, Seamus, I remember being struck by the realization that only you would be capable of producing the right words to assuage Ireland’s sorrow over your passing.  Only you. You always had the right word right when I needed it, when I found myself in “limbo land,” uncertain – Incertus – between faith and doubt, a rock and a hard place, fear and wonder, magic and loss – myth and reality – maybe not unlike Van Morrison’s dweller on the threshold

If you have the words . . . there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way.

On this sixth anniversary of your death, I am pulled back to “The Underground,” one of my favorite poems. I didn’t know until recently that it was a favorite of yours too, and that back in 2009, when asked to choose a poem or two that would exemplify your lifetime achievement in poetry, ‘The Underground’ was one of them.

The Underground

There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,
You in your going-away coat speeding ahead
And me, me then like a fleet god gaining
Upon you before you turned to a reed

Or some new white flower japped with crimson
As the coat flapped wild and button after button
Sprang off and fell in a trail
Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.

Honeymooning, moonlighting, late for the Proms,
Our echoes die in that corridor and now
I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones
Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons

To end up in a draughty lamplit station
After the trains have gone, the wet track
Bared and tensed as I am, all attention
For your step following and damned if I look back.

You never looked back.

When I found out that your final words were in the form of a text to your wife from your hospital bed, I remembered your Orpheus in the Underworld, and the Latin you loved.

Noli Timere.

Just two words from an ancient world illuminating a tiny dark space – “Be not afraid.”

There was a surety in that, wasn’t there? All those years after first publishing your poems under a pseudonym, Incertus (Uncertain), you left  us with a simple, spare, and forward-looking reassurance. You had told us once before after all, that “it is important to be reassured.”

So thank you, Seamus.  I am still looking forward.  I am walking on air.

For that, I am forever in your debt.