Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; as 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 could 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, digging 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.

from Death of a Naturalist (1966)

Notes: This poem comes from Heaney's debut book of poems, and contains all his signature tones - a taste for sharp words that can almost transport sensory experience on the strength of how they sound, an English suffused with the the North Irish peat-iness, and a restlessness that becomes evident if one recites the verses out aloud.

I was thinking about this poem - which I discovered after hearing Heaney recite it¹ in his mage-like fashion, at a reading he gave in Atlanta - after a evening of Corona-suffused adda in a Latin American restaurant, situated on that lovely Sunset Park hill (O, what light there was, over the New York Bay, Manhattan's spires in the distance, and the oaks under which we stood for a few long minutes!) in Brooklyn.

It was on my mind because a topic of conversation revolved around the types (and uses) of poetry. Also in the course of which came up my quixotic desire to be some kind of a farmer. I suppose I will probably fail attaining that Wendell Berry-ian vision of becoming an honest-to-earth farmer (or husbandman, as Berry prefers to term such a person, in his poems). However to compensate, I think I will continue to dig in my own fashion, as I tried to earlier this morning.

[1] An archived recording of a Heaney reading, at the Lannan Foundation, sections of which I re-listen to, for apart from Heaney's obvious mastery over language and th lore, it also brings back memories of that live reading from which I walked out dumb-struck. Now, if all poetry readings could pack as much wallop, what would happen to poetry!