This poem describes the speaker's childhood memories of watching his father and grandfather dig potatoes and cut turf. He recalls following his father as he plowed fields with horses, trying to learn the skills of farming. While he wanted to be a farmer like the men in his family, he was always just "following in their shadow." The speaker finds himself now in the role of the father figure as his own father struggles to keep up with him.
The short but effective slide deck I used before the marketing department to sell the idea of our motto for The News-Sentinel: "Your Town, Your Voice."
The short but effective slide deck I used before the marketing department to sell the idea of our motto for The News-Sentinel: "Your Town, Your Voice."
In the summer of 1980, a maverick young doctor gave it all up, to hitchhike around the world.
The first arc he carved with his thumb stopped a little red pickup that took him over the horizon. Like his mythical hunter companion, Orion, he was on a vision quest, propelled toward the dawn to have his sight restored.
This is the story of that five-year odyssey to discover his Destiny.
In the summer of 1980, a maverick young doctor gave it all up, to hitchhike around the world.
The first arc he carved with his thumb stopped a little red pickup that took him over the horizon. Like his mythical hunter companion, Orion, he was on a vision quest, propelled toward the dawn to have his sight restored.
This is the story of that five-year odyssey to discover his Destiny.
This is a model for my students to use for practising handwriting. One slide for each letter of the alphabet, with upper case, lower case and a sentence.
This set of poems contains three poems by major Polish poets – ‘Blacksmith Shop’ by Czeslaw Milosz, ‘Nothing Special’ by Zbigniew Herbert and ‘Star’ by Adam Zagajewski.
The poets were close friends and associates, writing in the dark shadow of Polish suffering during and after the Second World War. Czesław Miłosz – a Nobel Laureate (1990) - translated the poems of Herbert and introduced Adam Zagajewski to English-speaking readers; Zagajewski wrote the Introduction to Herbert’s Collected Poems. All three poets were ‘makers’ in the oldest sense, artists building a world ‘from remnants’, celebrating the joys of ordinary life despite the ravages of history.
Three poems by British poets continue a theme of the power of poetry to record the world, to ‘tease out the melody’ and to give weight to memory and hope:
• ‘The Windhover’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins, written in Hopkins’ personal language of religious ecstasy.
• ‘At Sixty’ by the Shetlandic poet Christine de Luca, about reaching the age of sixty in the far north. The poem is written in Shetlandic, a Scots dialect still spoken in the Shetland Islands—which just happen to lie on the 60th parallel.
• ‘Ourstory’ by Carole Satyamurti, a tribute to the unsung ‘awkward women’ whose tenacity helped to liberate the lives of women today.
1. J -r / £
SEAMUS HEANEY
try the same author
Death of a Naturalist
poetry
DOOR INTO T H E DARK
WINTERING OUT
NORTH
FIELD WORK.
STATION ISLAND
SWEENEY ASTRAY
SELECTED POEMS
THE HAW LANTERN
NEW SELECTED POEMS 1^66—
THE CURE AT TROY
SEEING THINGS
prose
T H E R A T T L E B A G [edited with Ted Hughes)
PREOCCUPATIONS: SELECTED PROSE 1968-1978
T H E GOVERNMENT O F T H E TONGUE
KM , °l[ £ faber andfaber
LONDON BOSTON
Htf<^ 114573
2. Digging
Between my finger and my t h u m b
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my w i n d o w , a clean rasping sound
W h e n the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
M y father, digging. I l o o k d o w n
T i l l his straining r u m p among the flowerbeds
Bends l o w , comes up twenty years away
Stooping i n r h y t h m through potato drills
"Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the l u g , the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
T o scatter new potatoes that we picked,
L o v i n g their cool hardness i n our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a" spade.
Just like his old man.
M y grandfather cut more turf i n a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried h i m m i l k i n a bottle
Corked sloppily w i t h paper. H e straightened up
T o drink i t , then fell to r i g h t away
[x]
3. N i c k i n g and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going d o w n and down Death of a Naturalist
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato m o u l d , the squelch and slap A l l year the flax-dam festered i n the heart
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge O f the t o w n l a n d ; green and heavy headed
Through living roots awaken i n m y head.. Flax had rotted there, weighted d o w n by huge sods.
But I've no spade to f o l l o w men like them. Daily i t sweltered i n the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Between m y finger and m y t h u m b Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
The squat pen rests. There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,
I ' l l dig w i t h i t . But best of all was the w a r m thick slobber
O f frogspawn that grew like clotted water
I n the shade of the banks. Here, every spring,
I w o u l d fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window-sills at home,
O n shelves at school, and w a i t and "watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls w o u l d tell us h o w
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog.
A n d h o w he croaked, and h o w the mammy f r o g
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. Y o u could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow i n the sun and b r o w n
I n rain.
Then one h o t day when fields were rank
W i t h cowdung i n the grass, the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
T o a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick w i t h a bass chorus.
Right d o w n the dam, gross-bellied frogs were cocked
[3]
4. O n sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some .
hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats; Some saf
'Poised like m u d grenades, their blunt heads farting.
1 sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
"Were gathered "there'iof vengeance, "and I k n e w
That i f I dipped m y hand the-spawn w o u l d clutch i t
[4]
6. where the halved seed shot and clotted,
At a Potato Digging these knobbed and slit-eyed tubers seem
the petrified hearts of drills. Split
by the spade, they show white as cream.
i
Good smells exude f r o m crumbled earth.
A mechanical digger wrecks the d r i l l ,
The rough bark of humus erupts
Spins up a dark shower of roots and m o u l d .
knots of potatoes (a clean birth)
Labo urers swarm i n behind, stoop to fill
whose solid feel, whose wet insides
Wicker creels. Fingers go dead i n the cold.
promise taste of ground and root.
To be piled i n pits; live skulls, blind-eyed.
Like crows attacking crow-black fields, they stretch
A higgledy line f r o m hedge to headland;
Some pairs keep breaking ragged ranks to fetch ill ,-
A f u l l creel to the p i t and straighten, stand.
Live skulls, blind-eyed, balanced on
w i l d higgledy skeletons,
Tall for a moment but soon stumble back
To fish a- new load f r o m the crumbled surf. scoured the land i n 'forty-five,
Heads bow, trunks bend, hands fumble towards the wolfed the blighted r o o t and died.
black
M o t h e r . Processional stooping through the t u r f The new potato, sound as stone,
putrefied when i t h a d lain
Recurs mindlessly as autumn. Centuries three days i n the l o n g clay p i t .
O f fear and hljma^e to the famine god Millions rotted along w i t h i t .
Toughen the muscles behind their humbled knees,
Make a seasonal altar of the sod. Mouths tightened i n , eyes died hard,
faces chilled to a plucked b i r d .
In a million wicker huts,
II
beaks of famine snipped at guts.
Flint-white, purple. They lie scattered
like inflated pebbles.. Native A people hungering f r o m b i r t h ,
to the black hutch of clay grubbing, like plants, i n the earth,
[18] [19]
7. were grafted w i t h a great sorrow.
Hope rotted like a marrow. For the Commander of the Eliza
. . . the others, with emaciated faces and prominent, staring
Stinking potatoes fouled the land,
eyeballs, were evidently in an advanced state of starvation. The
pits turned pus into filthy mounds: officer reported to Sir James Dombrain . . . and Sir James, 'very
and where potato diggers are, inconveniently', wrote Routh, 'interfered',
you still smell the running sore. CECIL WOODHAM-SMITH: THE GREAT HUNGER
Routine patrol off West M a y o ; sighting
iv •
A rowboat heading unusually far
Under a gay flotilla of gulls Beyond the creek, I tacked and hailed the crew
The r h y t h m deadens, the workers stop. I n Gaelic. Their stroke had clearly weakened
B r o w n bread and tea i n bright canfuls As they pulled to, f r o m guilt or bashfulness
Are served for lunch. Dead-beat, they flop I was conjecturing when, O my sweet Christ,
W e saw piled i n the b o t t o m of their craft
D o w n in the ditch and take their fill, Six g r o w n men w i t h gaping mouths -an'd eyes
Thankfully breaking timeless fasts;' Bursting the sockets like spring onions-in drills.
Then, stretched on the faithless ground, spill Six wrecks of bone and pallid, tautened skin.
Libations of cold tea, scatter crusts. 'Bia, bia,
Bia'. I n whines and snarls their desperation
Rose and fell like a flock of starving gulls.
W e ' d k n o w n about the shortage, hut on board
They always kept us right w i t h flour and beef
So understand my feelings, and the men's,
W h o had no mandate to relieve distress
Since relief was then available i n Westport —
T h o u g h clearly these.poor brutes w o u l d never make i t .
I had to refuse food: they cursed and h o w l e d
Like dogs that had been kicked hard i n the privates.
W h e n they drove at me w i t h their starboard oar
(Risking capsize themselves) I saw they were
Violent and w i t h o u t hope. I hoisted
A n d cleared off. Less incidents the better.
[zo]
8. Trout Waterfall
Hangs,' a fat gun-barrel, The burn drowns steadily i n its o w n d o w n p o u r ,
deep under arched bridges A helter-skelter of muslin and glass
or slips like butter d o w n , That skids to a halt, crashing up suds.
the tdjjSg^t of the river.
Simultaneous acceleration •
From depths smooth-skinned as plums, A n d sudden braking; water goes over
his muzzle gets -bnil!s_eve^_ Like villains dropped screaming to justice.
picks off grass-seed and moths
that vanish, torpedoed. ,^jt_ar£p_ears an athletic glacier
Hasrearea 7nto reverse: is iljalkyv^ed up
r
Where water unravels A n d regurgitated through this l o n g i & r o a t .
over gravel-beds he
is fired from the shallows, JMveye.rides over and downwards, falls w i t h
white belly reporting H u r t l i n g tons that slabber and spill,
Falls, yet records t h e ^ ^ ^ t t thus standing still.
flat; darts like a tracer- .
bullet back between stones
and is never burnt out.
A volley of cold ^ f o ^
ramrodding the current.
[z6] [2.7]