THE BIRTHPLACE I The deal table where he wrote, so small and plain, the single bed a dream of discipline. And a flagged kitchen downstairs, its mote-slants of thick light; the unperturbed, reliable ghost life he carried, with no need to invent. And high trees round the house, breathed upon day and night by winds as slow as a cart coming late from market, or the stir a fiddle could make in his reluctant heart. -- Seamus Heaney