Big voices in the womanless kitchen.
They never lit a lamp in the summertime
but took the twilight as it came
like solemn trees. They sat in the dark
with their pipes red in the their mouths, the talk come down
to Aye and Aye again and, when the dog shifted,
a curt There boy!
I closed my eyes
to make the light motes stream behind them
and my head went airy, my chair rode
high and low among branches and the wind
stirred up a rookery in the next long Aye.
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by Seamus Heaney, 1984
