Video Meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor

Sampling Seamus
I'm sick, you're sick, we're all sick of....war talk. So let's cleanse the palate with a little Seamus Heaney:


The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
___

All year the flex-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy-headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
___

As a child, they could not keep me from the wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses,
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

Now to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all human dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

-excerpts from poems by Irish poet Seamus Heaney