I <br /> <br />To-night, a first movement, a pulse, <br />As if the rain in bogland gathered head <br />To slip and flood: a bog-burst, <br />A gash breaking open the ferny bed. <br />Your back is a firm line of eastern coast <br />And arms and legs are thrown <br />Beyond your gradual hills. I caress <br />The heaving province where our past has grown. <br />I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder <br />That you would neither cajole nor ignore. <br />Conquest is a lie. I grow older <br />Conceding your half-independant shore <br />Within whose borders now my legacy <br />Culminates inexorably. <br /> <br />II <br /> <br />And I am still imperially <br />Male, leaving you with pain, <br />The rending process in the colony, <br />The battering ram, the boom burst from within. <br />The act sprouted an obsinate fifth column <br />Whose stance is growing unilateral. <br />His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum <br />Mustering force. His parasitical <br />And ignorant little fists already <br />Beat at your borders and I know they're cocked <br />At me across the water. No treaty <br />I foresee will salve completely your tracked <br />And stretchmarked body, the big pain <br />That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again<br /><br />Seamus Heaney<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/act-of-union/
