Poetry in the Weekend Newspapers

Today's Guardian had a very generous collection of poems on the wars in Iraq and/or Afghanistan by poets invited by Carol Ann Duffy. It made me buy a different newspaper than the one I'd usually get on a Saturday morning. But to advertise Paul Muldoon on the front cover and then find he had only extended himself to two lines caused some disappointment even if we had no right to expect another Incantata.
And it is to be assumed that poets aren't generally in favour of wars these days. I'm not. There is very little reason for British soldiers to be in those faraway places about which our leaders appear to know hardly anything at all. But it doesn't make me want to write poems about the issue and perhaps some of these poems were written because the poets thought they ought to, having been asked. That said, Duffy herself and Ian Duhig made a good job of it and O'Brien turned out some typically O'Brien directives.
Last week, The Observer magazine featured an interview with the highly interviewable Seamus Heaney, at 70. I nearly jumped to it, thinking it was his birthday now, and nearly wrote my own little tribute. But his birthday was in April. However, I'd still like to share my favourite Heaney poem, A Brigid's Girdle, with you, because it is brilliant. And for no other reason.

http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Museum/3655/heaney.html