Digging -- Seamus Heaney

Digging

BY SEAMUS HEANEY

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. Reprinted with the permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC.

Poem: The Railway Children

Prepare to write in your composition book:  

In your composition book, write -- 

      Title:  The Railway Children     Date:  September 3, 2013

 

1. Read the poem and write for two minutes about anything at all the poem brings to mind.

2.  Borrow a line or phrase from the poem, and create your own poem, story, or other piece of writing based on that line or phrase. 

The Railway Children  by Seamus Heaney (b. 1939, died Aug. 30, 2013)

When we climbed the slopes of the cutting
We were eye-level with the white cups
Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.

Like a lovely freehand they curved for miles
East and miles west beyond us, sagging
Under their burden of swallows.

We were small and thought we knew nothing
Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires
In the shiny pouches of raindrops,

Each one seeded full with the light
Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves
So infinitesimally scaled

We could stream through the eye of a needle.

____________________

1. Read the poem and write for two minutes about anything at all the poem brings to mind.

2.  Borrow a line or phrase from the poem, and create your own poem, story, or other piece of writing based on that line or phrase. 

Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)

Mr. Heaney died August 30, 2013.

In 2008, Heaney told All Thing Considered that "I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/08/30/217122022/irish-poet-seamus-heaney-dies