Poetic physics of Seamus Heaney. An excerpt form “The Smoothing Iron.”
Soft thumps on the ironing board.
Her dimpled angled elbow
and intent stoop
as she aimed the smoothing ironlike a plane into linen,
like the resentment of women.
To work, her dumb lunge says,
is to move a certain massthrough a certain distance,
is to pull your weight and feel
exact and equal to it.
Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.
Heaney, Seamus. “The Smoothing Iron.” Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. Print.