SCRABBLE in memoriam Tom Delaney, archaeologist Bare flags. Pump water. Winter-evening cold. Our backs might never warm up but our faces Burned from the hearth-blaze and the hot whiskeys. It felt remembered even then, an old Rightness half-imagined or foretold. As green sticks hissed and spat into the ashes And whatever rampaged out there couldn't reach us, Firelit, shuttered, slated and stone-walled. Year after year, our game of Scrabble: love Taken for granted like any other word That was chanced on and allowed within the rules. So "scrabble" let it be. Intransitive. Meaning to scratch or rake at something hard. Which is what he hears. Our scraping, clinking tools. -- Seamus Heaney, from "Glanmore Revisited."