'Digging'

Lawrie came into the office yesterday, armed with copies of his World Book Night book: Seamus Heaney's Selected Poems 1966-1987 which he kindly gave to some of us. He also took our photos and asked that skippygirl and I use of his poems as inspiration for a blip.

I first encountered Heaney's poems as an A-level student as I'd squeezed Eng Lit in amongst the science A-levels and he was our main poet. I quickly fell in love with his words and was over the moon when I had the chance to listen to him give a reading of some of his poems a few years ago.

I asked Lawrie if I could just point people to the blip of Blackberry Picking, that I did last August, but he said no - so, here is 'Digging' which I've chosen for two reasons:
- it was the first poem of his I read
- it seemed like the easiest one to blip ;-)

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as 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 could 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, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mold, 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.


- from Death of a Naturalist (1966)

Dig deeper