His Nibs Mr Seamus Heaney RIP

Seamus Heaney meeting HRH The Queen, Prince Phillip and Irish President Mary McAleese, during the Queen's  recent visit to Ireland

In  1993 my mother, during her visit, presented me with a book New Selected Poems 1966-1987. The author Seamus Heaney.  Heaney, like W.B Yeats and Samual Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

The book is well thumbed, there may be a tear and also a stain from a tear or two shed while reading and re-reading my favourite poems.

I shall leave you, my writer friends, with this peom called 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.

May your soul be at God's right hand side dear Seamus.