A sense for touch

This one showcases Heaney’s gift for tactile imagery:

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From Glanmore Sonnets

By Seamus Heaney

V

Soft corrugations in the boortree’s trunk,

Its green young shoots, its rods like freckled solder:  

It was our bower as children, a greenish, dank

And snapping memory as I get older.

And elderberry I have learned to call it.

I love its blooms like saucers brimmed with meal,  

Its berries a swart caviar of shot,

A buoyant spawn, a light bruised out of purple.  

Elderberry? It is shires dreaming wine.

Boortree is bower tree, where I played ‘touching tongues’

And felt another’s texture quick on mine.

So, etymologist of roots and graftings,

I fall back to my tree-house and would crouch

Where small buds shoot and flourish in the hush.