Icy Mountains Constantly Walking

Gary Snyder (1995)

for Seamus Heaney

Work took me to Ireland
a twelve-hour flight.
The river Liffy;
ale in a bar,
So many stories
of passions and wars—
A hilltop stone tomb
with the wind across the door.
Peat swamps go by:
people of the ice age.
Endless fields and farms—
the last two thousand years.

I read my poems in Galway,
just the chirp of a bug.
Amd flew home thinking
of literature and time.

The rows of books
in the Long Hall at Trinity
The ranks of stony ranges
above the ice of Greenland.