Mid-Term BreakI sat all morning in the college sick bay Counting bells knelling classes to a close. At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home. In the porch I met my father crying– He had always taken funerals in his stride– And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow. The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram When I came in, and I was embarrassed By old men standing up to shake my hand And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'. Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest, Away at school, as my mother held my hand In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs. At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses. Next morning I went up into the room. SnowdropsAnd candles soothed the bedside; I saw him For the first time in six weeks. Paler now, Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple, He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot. No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear. A four-foot box, a foot for every year. Seamus Heaney
Some Similar Quotes
  1. Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings. - Unknown

  2. My dear, Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you and let it devour your remains. For all things will... - Charles Bukowski

  3. If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled? - Jodi Picoult

  4. Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect. - J.k. Rowling

  5. Love is how you stay alive, even after you are gone. - Mitch Albom

More Quotes By Seamus Heaney
  1. It is always betterto avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning. For every one of us, living in this worldmeans waiting for our end. Let whoever canwin glory before death. When a warrior is gone, that will be his best and only bulwark.

  2. History says, Don’t hope On this side of the grave, But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme

  3. If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.

  4. All I know is a door into the dark

  5. I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.

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