S/ but a limerick

This “simple” poem only looks simple. But to write this well takes a gift few have. And a lot of work also.

He’s in his early ’70s now and coming off a stroke. Did not look well the last time I saw a photo and a TV clip in which he spoke.

There’s “slant” rhyme, internal rhyme and assonance in this poem so beautifully used that you can hear it but you can’t see it till you search for it.

I remember reading a poem like this by him in an Irish magazine back in the late Sixties and early Seventies when no one had heard of him. Right then I felt like never trying to write another poem. But you work with what you have. No one today is writing poetry in English like Heaney. Some say he’s slipping with age but he has a long way to fall before he reaches everyone else still scribbling.

It’s short enough to read twice, and it’s the second time the music starts, Irish music, that only Heaney can play.