From Wikipedia:
Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 for what the Nobel committee described as “works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past”.
‘Sunlight’, first published in 1975 in the book North, is one of two “Poems in Dedication” that were written for his aunt, Mary Heaney. These poems come together under the title “Mossbawn,” a reference to the family farm on which Heaney lived until 1953.
I. Sunlight
There was a sunlit absence.
The helmeted pump in the yard
heated its iron,
water honeyed/
in the slung bucket
and the sun stood
like a griddle cooling
against the wall/
of each long afternoon.
So, her hands scuffled
over the bakeboard,
the reddening stove/
sent its plaque of heat
against her where she stood
in a floury apron
by the window./
Now she dusts the board
with a goose’s wing,
now sits, broad-lapped,
with whitened nails/
and measling shins:
here is a space
again, the scone rising
to the tick of two clocks./
And here is love
like a tinsmith’s scoop
sunk past its gleam
in the meal-bin.
