In Gallarus Oratory

By Seamus Heaney
Read by Sodiq Ajibola Abiola

You can still feel the community pack
This place: it’s like going into a turfstack,
A core of old dark walled up with stone
A yard thick. When you’re in it alone
You might have dropped, a reduced creature,
To the heart of the globe. No worshipper
Would leap up to his God off this floor.
Founded there like heroes in a barrow,
They sought themselves in the eye of their King
Under the black weight of their own breathing.
And how he smiled on them as out they came,
The sea a censer, and the grass a flame.

Credits

Directed by Matthew Thompson.

"In Gallarus Oratory" from Door into the Dark by Seamus Heaney © The Estate of Seamus Heaney, 1969. Reused by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.