My Limericks with Seamus Heaney

I went for the coffee and donuts, and traded some rhymes with the man signing books of poetry. I didn’t know who he was. He was Irish, I knew he had some poems about the problems Ireland has had over the years. I had some free time and heard about the literary reception; I’m literate, so I went.

I had a plate with an onion bagel as I walked up to the poet and said, “There once was a boy from Dundalk, who didn’t know quite how to walk….”

“It’s the Brits fault, think about it,” he replied with a finger in the air for emphasis as he looked at me directly. He was smiling. I like to play with words, and so did he.

I thought he enjoyed a little unvarnished wordplay among all the fawning fans asking for his scribble in the front of a book. I started again, “There once was a boy from Peru, who didn’t know quite what to do, he went to his mama, who showed him a Llama….and the rest of the rhyme’s up to you.”

He laughed. I can’t remember his reply to that. It was a sunny April day as we chatted in the school’s library with a couple of dozen other people around we were against a low book case. Coffee makes my brain race. Words spill out.

We talked about Lord Montbatten being killed by an IRA commando team in a targeted assassination in 1979. He talked about Mountbatten being a colonial master in India enforcing English rule, that he was not just a random fisherman with a title. Heaney spoke about Montbatten being the last British Viceroy of India, an unelected dictator from a foreign country I mentioned that Lord Montbatten had been the British official in charge of the allied occupation of Vietnam at the end of WW2, and Montbatten re-armed Japanese Imperial Army troops to put down a Vietnamese Trotskyist working class uprising in 1945 in Saigon. (cont. https://xenagoguevicene.wordpress.com/2013/09/03/my-limericks-with-seamus-heaney/ )