Seamus Heaney came up in conversation yesterday, and I remembered that a stunning poem of Heaney’s had been read out an Nana’s funeral in February 2021.
The ritual of Mass was a big party of Sunday for our family growing up, like most Irish families. “I was all hers” beautifully captures the sensation of quiet and a free hour, from not going to Mass for whatever reason.
The heaviness of the image Heaney is creating is captured in the image of potato peelings falling “one by one” and the metaphor of solder “weeping” off the soldering iron. An odd jumble of visual connections that we’re thrown into by Healey, before the levity of how refreshing little splashes of water are to bring us to our senses. Is this a reference to holy water itself, and a cynicism as to faith?
For the young, the flickerings of holy water is a mystical experience that can provoke deep loyalty to the unknowns of faith, or laughter. And, that is how we are as humans and tribes, “each to his own” we’ll say flippantly but it’s not so when it comes to a land dispute or other difference of opinion with a tribal spine of religious connection behind it.
For me this poem is most extraordinary in its closing sentences, which relates the last moments of life before death to random moments of closeness in healthier times.
And so it is when a mother dies.
You can find “When All The Others Were Away At Mass” here on a section of the RTE website called A Poem for Ireland.
