Thursday

13 April 2017

— having on this rain-swept morning just come in from restocking the feeders

Good Morning All,

Today’s poem is by Seamus Heaney, Digging, is one of my dozen favorite poems. Indeed, Heaney has at least four of my 100 favorites. Even if you are a severe poetry-phobe, even if the very word poetry makes you shiver and froth as you rush to get your poetry-shields in place, even if you regard all poets as you might a maniacally grinning dentist lifting a jack-hammer to get at your back molars, please give this poem a chance! 

At the risk of sounding again like a show-off Mr. Know-All, allow me to give you a small hint: relax and read it as prose. You can always go back later and enjoy the music, the metaphor, or whatever. (But don’t miss what happens to his pen during his reflections about his dad and granddad.)

      I actually got to meet Mr. Heaney. The trouble is, I’m pretty sure I have recently told this story. By recently, I mean any period of time from last week to five years ago. I never did have much of a calendar in my head, not a reliable one, and by my mid-sixties, what I did have seemed more to resemble a bunch of torn off sheets lying in a clutter behind the sofa.

But what the heck, I’ll tell it, anyway. Feel free to tell me to stop if you have already heard it, but shout loudly because my hearing aids are taking a break by my bedside clock, and all of you are anywhere from 6 to 6,000 miles away.

I’d gone with school colleagues to hear him reading at the University of Copenhagen. Someone had just come out with a volume of his work translated into Danish. They took turns reading the poems, sometimes Heaney first, sometimes the Danish guy. 

Afterwards, I accosted him in the cloakroom. I had one of his Faber and Faber books to hand. I introduced myself as an English teacher at the Copenhagen International School, mentioned that he ought to be arrested for being able to write poetry that well, and inquired if he might not mind briefly inscribing a book for one of my all-time best students, an Irish lass, a poet herself, though she did her best to escape that fate. He said sure.

I opened his book to the title page, which included a line drawing of two men, each in a rowboat. I said, “If you could just write: Dear Maeve, Simp Simp Phui. And then sign your name.

Not surprisingly, He looked at me as though I must be crackers. “No, don’t worry,” I said, “I’m not. That’s just a mnemonic for helping the kids remember the principal figures of speech. The first Simp, for example, stands for simile, implied metaphor, metaphor, and personification." Then, figuring I could give this Nobel Laureate a couple of good tips, I added, “Next you’ve got your Synecdoche, idiom, metonymy, and pun. And the last one, the Phui, is for paradox, hyperbole, understatement and irony."

Now that much more convinced I was crackers, he proceeded to draw a speech bubble above one of the rowers; in it wrote, Dear Maeve, Simp Simp Phui.” I was about to thank him when he drew a bubble over the other rower and wrote, “Are you barmy?” After which he signed his name and handed back the book with what I must say was a most charming and forgiving Irish smile.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron

Digging

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 mold, 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.