#ash keys

Lil Pumpkin is visiting the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic!

In Boscastle, in Cornwall, England.

Social media – at least the bit of it that arrives on my screens – is alive this morning with many expressions of sadness at the announcement of the death of Michael Longley. I heard him read just a few months ago to launch his most recent new selected poems, Ash Keys, at the LRB Bookshop in London. He insisted then on trying to stand to read his poems, though his breathlessness and physical…

Ash Keys

Ghosts of hedgers and ditchers, The ash trees rattling keys Above tangles of hawthorn And bramble, alder and gorse,

Would keep me from pacing Commonage, long perspectives And conversations, a field That touches the horizon.

I am herding cattle there As a boy, as the old man Following in his footsteps Who begins the task again,

As though there’d never been In some interim or hollow Wives and children, milk And buttermilk, market days.

Far from the perimeter Of watercress and berries, In the middle of the field I stand talking to myself,

While the ash keys scatter And the gates creak open And the barbed wire rusts To hay-ropes strung with thorns.