I know that pump
and the coldness of it
on whitened
winter mornings
and that bucket,
the awkward weight,
held away, wide
of your body.
They must eat, of course,
the men, the children,
roaring in
full of hunger,
and is this not an act
of heroism? The daily task
of giving
to them,
the daily act of staying
here, in this narrow place,
not spreading those
white wings, folding.
The beating hearts of all
those women, who have
poured out
their desires
and here is love
in these four walls
and the hands’ movements
again repeated.
This is my “cover” of ‘Sunlight’ by Seamus Heaney, for a dVerse (Tricky) prompt. You can find the original here: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1995/poems-1-e.html
I have tried to keep something of the spirit and the feel of the original. I wrote out each stanza of the original and then wrote out my response to it, and found I seemed to have written a poem that worked. Seamus Heaney wrote beautiful poems filled with intense local detail and universal significance. He works on many levels.