"When all the others were away at Mass" [from Clearances in memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984] by Seamus Heaney When all the others were away at Mass I was all hers as we peeled potatoes. They broke the silence, let fall one by one Like solder weeping off the soldering iron: Cold comforts set between us, things to share Gleaming in a bucket of clean water. And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes From each other’s work would bring us to our senses. So while the parish priest at her bedside Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying And some were responding and some crying I remembered her head bent towards my head, Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives– Never closer the whole rest of our lives. From New Selected Poems 1966-1987 © Estate of Seamus Heaney and reprinted by kind permission of the Heaney family and Faber and Faber Ltd. Seamus Heaney was born on 13 April 1939 in a ‘one-storey, longish, lowish, thatched and whitewashed farmhouse’ in Mossbawn, a forty-acre farm in Co. Derry. He was the eldest of nine children, two girls and seven boys, one of whom, Christopher, died very young in a road accident. Heaney grew up in a culture that was ‘Catholic, folk, rural, Irish’.