Ploughed

Autumnal scene.

Seamus Heaney's poem Ploughing (below|) poignantly makes the link between the waning year and the equivalent season in our human lives when he references his ageing father in the final verse. 

By coincidence we saw the film The Father last night with Anthony Hopkins' extraordinary portrait of a man struggling with his mental decline  while his daughter struggles with her conlicted loyalties to him and her new partner. The way in which we the audience become confused and self-doubting too is both brilliant and disturbing. We have to face the fact that as medical expertise and healthy life styles keep people alive  longer this will be the future for many of us.

Ploughing

My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horses strained at his clicking tongue.

An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.
The sod rolled over without breaking.
At the headrig, with a single pluck

Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly.

I stumbled in his hobnailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back
Dipping and rising to his plod.

I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away