Heritage
I thought I might post some Dylan Thomas for Mr. Smith, S; but the volume I had in mind has escaped to some far corner of the house and may take some time to unearth, this being a cluttered place. So, instead, here's a Celt from another place:
This poem by Seamus Heaney will resonate - with memories of fathers and the legacy they left us. Not money. Not class. Not status. But a fastness we recognise in them regretfully too late, and in ourselves belatedly. Gratefully. Here it is:
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.
Nice poem, reminds me less of my Father and more of my Grandfather who had an allotment that he rented from British Rail at the back of their house on Bryant Street. There was a small garden area with a tiny lawn and in the summer he would grow sweet peas up a trellis at the back of it. I would sit there with a glass of sixties fluorescent lemonade and wave at the steam train drivers as the monster locomotives rushed past en-route to who knows where. Granddad would be working the ground for the myriad of vegetables and soft fruit that he cultivated in the fine sandy soil. If I was lucky he would break off, take my hand and we'd walk down to the steep sided Soho Loop of the canal and marvel at how high we were above it.
ReplyDeleteThe house is no longer there and that beautifully tended ground is now a car park for the factory at the end of the street.
I first heard this poem on Radio 4 some years ago, read by Seamus Heaney himself - absolutely beautiful...it occasionally gets a reprise on Poetry Please. I think it just evokes that sense of slight awe that you have as a child: mine was watching Dad working on things in the shed and wishing I had his hands - big, strong; tendons & veins standing out - of course I now have those veiny work-hardened hands myself, though not quite as large as his were!
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