The Story Archive

Door into the Dark

Seamus Heaney · 1969 CE · Poem · English · Contemporary

A blacksmith works out of sight behind a door into the dark, his anvil set in the middle of the shop like an altar; a thatcher pins down a roof, and eelmen shoot their lines across Lough Neagh. The ground opens too, yielding butter kept sweet under peat for a century and the skeleton of the Great Irish Elk. The second collection, where craft and buried ground first work as one figure.

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