John Hewitt’s poetry (http://library.ulster.ac.uk/craine/hewitt/work.htm#if )
If I should be remembered after this,
pray providence it be by happy men
who do not feel the skull behind the kiss,
the bony knuckles round the rusting pen,
but summon from the stiff archaic words
a heart whose pulse in its best moments was
free on the wing, as natural as the birds,
as clear and common as the year’s first grass.
For I was nourished by the normal year,
leafmold and frosted clod and sudden rain,
and though a sick age ran its steep career
the quiet voices were not all in vain.
odespinner 