II
Sad gang of apparitions
Your skinned muscles like plaited sedge
And your spines hooped towards the sunk edge
Of the spade, my patient ones,
Tell me, as you labour hard
To break this unrelenting soil
What barns are there for you to fill?
What farmer dragged you from the boneyard?
Or are you emblems of the truth,
Death's lifers, hauled from the narrow cell
And stripped of night-shirt shrouds, to tell:
'This is the reward of faith
In rest eternal. Even death
Lies. The void deceives.
We do not fall like autumn leaves
To sleep in peace. Some traitor breath
Revives our clay, sends us abroad
And by the sweat of our stripped brows
We earn our deaths; our one repose
When the bleeding instep finds its spade.'
Seamus Heaney, North, Faber and Faber, 1985.
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