• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content

Reads Poems

  • Epigrams
  • Inside baseball
    • Pinball at Cafe Pantheon
  • h.a.m.
  • Oswego
  • All poems
  • Contact

Machine Learning

The machine delivered
Seamus Heaney’s poem May,
wherein I found ‘fontanel,’ a treat,
if I’d been foraging morels.

But, I’d asked for Iron Spike,
wherein he visits Eagle Pond,
home of Don Hall and Jane Kenyon,
poets he had a soft spot for.

– Dave Read

Railroad ties at Eagle Pond Farm
Railroad ties at Eagle Pond Farm, where Seamus Heaney harvested his “Iron Spike.”

In his last book, A Carnival of Losses, Don tells of the time in 1979 when Seamus Heaney, his wife and children, came to Eagle Pond Farm to visit Don and Jane Kenyon. Heaney found “…a railway spike, which he took home to Dublin and kept in his study. When I was recovering from a cancer, Seamus sent me a broadside of his poem, The Spike. It hangs by my bed, inscribed inside an orange wooden frame.”

Filed Under: Inside baseball

Copyright © 2023 ยท Dave Read; WordPress by ReadWebco - Profile at Poets & Writers.

  • Table of contents