Today the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who won the Novel Price in Literature in 1995, died in Dublin. Here is a poem he published in 1966, when he was 27 years old:
Digging
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
That's great.
ReplyDeleteThere was this writing student at WKU--I hardly knew him and don't remember his name--but he was so good. He did this essay one time about being home on a long weekend from school and working with his carpenter dad. It had all these great specifics about his dad's job and about how he (the writing student) didn't come at stuff from the same perspective and, therefore, didn't often use the tools correctly. It was just great.