Prepare to write in your composition book:
In your composition book, write --
Title: The Railway Children Date: September 3, 2013
1. Read the poem and write for two minutes about anything at all the poem brings to mind.
2. Borrow a line or phrase from the poem, and create your own poem, story, or other piece of writing based on that line or phrase.
The Railway Children by Seamus Heaney (b. 1939, died Aug. 30, 2013)
When we climbed the slopes of the cutting
We were eye-level with the white cups
Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.
Like a lovely freehand they curved for miles
East and miles west beyond us, sagging
Under their burden of swallows.
We were small and thought we knew nothing
Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires
In the shiny pouches of raindrops,
Each one seeded full with the light
Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves
So infinitesimally scaled
We could stream through the eye of a needle.
We were eye-level with the white cups
Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.
Like a lovely freehand they curved for miles
East and miles west beyond us, sagging
Under their burden of swallows.
We were small and thought we knew nothing
Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires
In the shiny pouches of raindrops,
Each one seeded full with the light
Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves
So infinitesimally scaled
We could stream through the eye of a needle.
____________________
1. Read the poem and write for two minutes about anything at all the poem brings to mind.
2. Borrow a line or phrase from the poem, and create your own poem, story, or other piece of writing based on that line or phrase.
Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)
Mr. Heaney died August 30, 2013.
In 2008, Heaney told All Thing Considered that "I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing."
