Mint for Seamus Heaney

I have felt very saddened by Seamus Heaney's death. I felt a somehow personal connection to him, though never met him. His collection The Spirit Level figured quite centraly in my years of Analysis.
So here is his poem from that collection :
Mint
It looked like a clump of small dust nettles
Growing wild at the gable of the house
Beyond where we dumped our refuse and old bottles:
Unverdant ever, almost beneath notice.

But, to be fair, it also spelled promise
And newness at the backyard of our life
As if something callow yet tenacious
Sauntered in green alleys and grew rife.

The snip of scissor blades, the light of sunday
Mornings when the mint was cut and loved
My last things with be first things slipping from me
Yet let all things go free that have survived.

Let the smells of mint go heady and defenceless
like inmates liberated in that yard
Like the disregarded ones we turned against
Because we'd failed them with our disregard.