EULOGY FOR A STILL-BORN CHILD, by Seamus Heaney

I find that I am eager for good poetry to help me through this time. I thought this one was beautiful.

EULOGY FOR A STILL-BORN CHILD

Your mother walks light as an empty creel
Unlearning the intimate nudge and pull

Your trussed-up weight of seed-flesh andbone-curd
Had insisted on. That evicted world

Contracts round its history, its scar.
Doomsday struck when your collapsedsphere

Extinguished itself in our atmosphere,
Your mother heavy with the lightness in her.

For six months you stayed cartographer
Charting my friend from husband towardsfather.

He guessed a globe behind your steadymound.
Then the pole fell, shooting star, into theground.

On lonely journeys I think of it all,
Birth of death, exhumation for burial;

A wreath of small clothes, a memorialpram
And parents reaching for a phantom limb.

I drive by remote control on this bare road
Under a drizzling sky, a circling rock.

Past mountain fields full to the brim withcloud.
White waves riding home on a wintry lough.

Seamus Heaney