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In Gallarus Oratory

Seamus Heaney

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.

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