The Official Nonsense Thread

[Minty]

I was a little upset at yesterday's news about Seamus Heaney dying. I did his poems at school, and he was one of the few ones we had forced upon us that I liked.

He never got much credit when he was alive from the arty-farty crowd. It seems post-Yeats if you're an Irish writer, unless you write endlessly about potato famines, British brutality or being molested by Catholic priests/nuns, you're ignored or accused of "domesticality" - whatever that means! Now he's dead they're praising him to the skies - typical!

My favourite one of his was "Digging" - a simple but beautifully written poem about trying to write when his dad was out the back gardening, leading to him daydreaming about watching his forefathers 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.