Gallarus Oratory (The Dingle Peninsula Trip)


Seamus Heaney, "In Gallarus Oratory" 

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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