It is a simple grave. No hero courageous tomb. No canal bank seat. Seamus Heaney rests in a corner of St Mary's churchyard at Ballaghy, Co Derry. It is a well-cared-for plot beside an ivy-clad stone wall and under ash and chestnut trees which breezily sway in a cheery waltz.
The Heaney family grave is next door but one, with the Scullions between him and them: his baby brother Christopher, his mother, his father, his two aunts, his sister Anne. A Ballaghy woman explained: “Fr Dolan [the parish priest] felt he should have a place of his own.”
His plot is covered in a tidy rectangle of peat moss, surrounded by greenest grass with a brass plate at the heart of its wooden cross telling us plainly: “Seamus Heaney 1939-2013. Rest in Peace.”
A bouquet of sunflowers lay on the grave with garden blooms at the foot of the cross. And blackberries. "Late August, given heavy rain and sun/For a full week, the blackberries would ripen./At first, just one, a glossy purple clot/Among others, red, green, hard as a knot." (From Blackberry-Picking.) As the reverent crowd gathered to remember, a lone robin rested on the cross, assessed its chances, dropped deftly to the blackberries below, pecked brusquely, and flitted back to the trees above. The man beneath would have unearthed profundity in such daring-do. Robins, too, make their own importance.
‘Quiet reflection’
Patrick Brennan, chair of the organising committee, said there would be “no music and no song, just poetry, following a moment of quiet reflection”.
And, as students from the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast prepared to read a selection of the dead man’s work, local children Michael McConomy and his cousin Melissa carried a specially commissioned harvest bow to his grave and placed it there with the exaggerated deliberation of the very young.
The harvest bow recalled the poet’s poem of that name and its memories of his father Patrick. “As you plaited the harvest bow/You implicated the mellowed silence in you/In wheat that does not rust . . .”
Stephen Connolly read the poem, followed by Deborah Logan's reading from Clearances, Heaney's sonnets on his mother Margaret. Nathaniel McCawley read The Aerodrome, and there was the chorus from The Cure at Troy with its hope and history rhyming.
Colm Heaney stood by his brother’s grave. “I miss him desperately,” he said and recalled visits to Seamus in Dublin. “He was very kind. In his way he would come down to my level, a van driver, and talk to me the same as a man from another country.” Colm then indicated his brother Hugh was the one “better at the talking”.
Hugh Heaney lives in the family home. “It’s lovely, it’s great, on his first anniversary,” he said of the event. He recalled the shock at his brother’s death “I was talking to him two days before he died, on his mobile, and he said ‘I’m afraid Hugh there’ll have to be cancellations.’ I said ‘not at all . . .’ I suppose he knew. That was on Wednesday and he died on Friday morning. I was very glad I spoke to him. I miss him a lot. Seamus never left Ballaghy, never left home. He was away all the time but his heart was always about. He was a countryman, never forgot home.”
Hugh liked the early poems particularly. "There's one called A Constable Calls [about an RUC officer coming to assess the family holding for tax purposes]. I love that. They're real. Clearances are my favourites. And I like one called The Outlaw about taking the cow to the bull. Kelly's unlicenced bull. So I can picture it. So real, true, simple, easy, not very difficult. And one called Mossbawn: Sunlight [a tribute to their aunt Mary]. Ach, they're great."
The gathering drifted off to tea while some followed a piper and drummer to the Turf Man sculpture in the village, inspired by the poem Digging. There Aidan Gribbin played Sliabh Gallion Brae on his fiddle, about a local mountain, and his wife Clodagh sang about the local Moyola river as the noisy life of the village continued.
Seamus Heaney would have enjoyed such unobtrusive celebration of the local while life went on but back in that most country of churchyards he rests, now and for eternity, among the McNeills, the Pimleys, the McGoldricks, the O’Donnells, Lavertys, McGlades, McErleans and McErlenes, Mulhollands, the Murray’s of Ballyscullion, and next to the Scullions. The last Scullion, Hugh, died in 1953 at the age of 74, the same age as Seamus Heaney when he died on August 30th last year.
‘A hard blow’
And 1953 was the year Christopher Heaney was killed by a car. The family gravestonereads: “Erected by Patrick Heaney in memory of his son Christopher, died 25th February 1953 aged 3.” In
Mid-Term Break
, Seamus wrote: “In the porch I met my father crying – He had always taken funerals in his stride – And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.”
