Wednesday Words - Digging

Lauded Irish bard, Seamus Heaney, who died last Friday was eulogized at his funeral in Dublin on Monday. His body was buried in his native Co Derry in the local Catholic church in Bellaghy village.

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.
 
Seamus Heaney, "Digging" from Death of a Naturalist. 
© Copyright 1966 by Seamus Heaney.

At Ireland’s national celebration of Heaney’s 70th birthday in 2009, it was announced that two-thirds of the poetry collections sold in the UK the previous year had been books by Heaney.

Christ and Pop Culture blogger, Ethan McCarthy wrote:

Such popularity for a contemporary poet, especially a traditionalist like Seamus Heaney, was and remains truly remarkable. By all accounts, he bore his fame with grace and self-deprecation, but his legacy is immense. His poetry is pitched to invite us into a world where the right things — home, nature, history, moral choice — matter, and where they’re shown up in all their complexity, mundanity, and transcendence. He is gone, but his poems will only grow more lovely with time. 

For more about the poet, click here (Poetry Foundation) and here (Wikipedia).