A HAZEL STICK FOR CATHERINE ANN The living mother-of-pearl of a salmon just out of the water is gone just like that, but your stick is kept salmon-silver. Seasoned and bendy, it convinces the hand that what you have you hold to play with and pose with and lay about with. But then too it points back to cattle and spatter and beating the bars of a gate -- the very stick we might cut from your family tree. The living cobalt of an afternoon dragonfly drew my eye to it first and the evening I trimmed it for you you saw your first glow-worm -- all of us stood round in silence, even you gigantic enough to darken the sky for a glow-worm. And when I poked open the grass a tiny brightening den lit the eye in the blunt pared end of your stick. -- Seamus Heaney, from "Opened Ground, Selected Poems of 1966-1996," (pub. 1998)