Gate

First published in the Dublin Magazine in Spring 1966, Gate looks back to the farm at Bellaghy, and remembers ‘the end of an ancestral bed’, used to stop gaps where the cattle feed in open fields. This relic of the farm is fondly recalled:

Now on its last legs, the old brass head

Trails open awkwardly on wire hinges,

Entrance and exit every morning and night

For cudding maters, udders swinging full.

It’s a short poem, its ten lines neatly describing the bed-end ‘Bracketing arrival and departure…’. The poem ends with a summing up of the whole exhausting business of raising cattle on a farm:

Think of the labour pains, shudders, whinges,

The hectic round of birth cry and death rattle.

The bed at once stands for the bed on which women give birth, and the death bed that comes at the end. Heaney manages to pack into ten short lines a great range of experience in this very short poem.