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
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.”