“The Railway Children”

I was really struck by it when I heard Seamus Heaney read it on NPR a few years ago. It’s a beautiful, touching, gently mind-bending vision from childhood. The last sentence (which is I guess almost half the poem) is just so lovely—as an image, an idea, and a sentence.

—Brian Gittis

The Railway Children

When we climbed the slopes of the cutting
We were eye-level with the white cups
Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.

Like lovely freehand they curved for miles
East and miles west beyond us, sagging
Under their burden of swallows.

We were small and thought we knew nothing
Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires
In the shiny pouches of raindrops,

Each one seeded full with the light
Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves
So infinitesimally scaled

We could stream through the eye of a needle.
 

Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. His poems, plays, translations, and essays include Opened Ground, Electric Light, Beowulf, The Spirit Level, District and Circle, and Finders Keepers. Robert Lowell praised Heaney as the “most important Irish poet since Yeats.”

Brian Gittis is an assistant publicity director at FSG

Read all of our Poetry Month coverage here