Spud rows and genocide

This year my favourite stubble field - I've blipped it before - has the farmer's potato patch still waiting to be dug.

Seamus Heaney, who died recently, wrote a poem called At a Potato Digging that makes a chilling link with the Irish famine of 1845. The fact that the Irish peasants were forced to subsist upon this single crop while their English landlords used the land to grow wheat for export meant that when the blight struck they had no other food resource. Three million died of starvation, another million emigrated.

Here's the middle section of the poem


Flint-white, purple. They lie scattered
like inflated pebbles. Native
to the black hutch of clay
where the halved seed shot and clotted
these knobbed and slit-eyed tubers seem
the petrified hearts of drills. Split
by the spade, they show white as cream.

Good smells exude from crumbled earth.
The rough bark of humus erupts
knots of potatoes (a clean birth)
whose solid feel, whose wet inside
promises taste of ground and root.
To be piled in pits; live skulls, blind-eyed.


Live skulls, blind-eyed, balanced on
wild higgledy skeletons
scoured the land in ‘forty-five,
wolfed the blighted root and died.

The new potato, sound as stone,
putrefied when it had lain
three days in the long clay pit.
Millions rotted along with it.

Mouths tightened in, eyes died hard,
faces chilled to a plucked bird.
In a million wicker huts
beaks of famine snipped at guts.

A people hungering from birth,
grubbing, like plants, in the bitch earth,
were grafted with a great sorrow.
Hope rotted like a marrow.

Stinking potatoes fouled the land,
pits turned pus into filthy mounds:
and where potato diggers are
you still smell the running sore.

These spuds look fine but if you have ever encountered a potato with blight (it's not uncommon) you'll know how its stinking deliquescence resembles putrefaction.

You can read this whole powerful poem here.
The National Portrait Gallery in London has just hung this painting of Heaney.