Chair, Pocket Knife, Guitar
The slatted folding chair you sat upon,
The scantlings and ad hoc stuff of that playroom
You screened out as you just rocked on and on
In perfect time before the television,
To-day let all that tick-tock bric-a-brac
Come like a drumstick stick-man rolling home.
The one-blade pocket knife you coveted
In a shop window that first evening in France
And I bought then on the spot in thanksgiving
For us just being there: although it’s lost
I stand like a glad Macbeth faced with its ghost
Handle towards my hand, saying, ‘Thank, thank God’.
The guitar you got the day you started school
And were photographed with, up on the picnic table,
Play it again to-day, fierce Andalucian
Serenades and country wedding songs,
Then hang it on the wall, your true love’s token,
Last thing before she sleeps, first when you waken.
According to Wikipedia Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 for "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past".[47] He was on holiday in Greece with his wife when the news broke. Neither journalists nor his own children could reach him until he arrived at Dublin Airport two days later, although an Irish television camera traced him to Kalamata. Asked how he felt to have his name added to the Irish Nobel pantheon of W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett, Heaney responded: "It's like being a little foothill at the bottom of a mountain range. You hope you just live up to it. It's extraordinary."[
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