Digging — Poetry is for everyone #10

This one's for the writers.

Welcome to the latest edition of poetry is for everyone. Each week I intuitively send out a poem that is speaking to me that hopefully in some numinous way speaks to you too. It is my intention to keep the selection diverse and interesting and introduce you to some new writers along the way. Feel free to make suggestions or recommend your favourite poets/poems to the group in the comments.

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One of my faves from possibly my all time fave.

Traditional. Earthy. A poet, bones to sky.

My love for Seamus Heaney knows no bounds.

A master craftsman and the embodiment of gentle strength. Dignified, thoughtful, precise and perhaps his most starry quality for me at least, his natural ability to surrender his work to the reader as soon as it had gone to print.

My second job out of drama school was The Burial at Thebes, Seamus Heaney’s adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone. Written in trimeter verse so three beats (or six syllables) to a line, as opposed to the far more commonly known iambic pentameter which is five (and Shakespeare’s vibe), meant it had great pace and urgency which as I’m sure you can imagine leant itself rather well to a Greek epic with high stakes and bloody outcomes.

At the beginning of rehearsals, our director contacted Seamus Heaney to see if he had any changes he wanted to make to the script. This was only the third time the show was being put on in fact really it was a revival of its second, the UK production that had premiered the year before with some of the actors reprising their original roles and others, like me, joining as new members of the cast. We all waited for his response with bated breath.

I had studied Heaney at high school and was already a huge fan of his work. The poem I almost shared today Bog Queen is one I loved so much I chose it for one of my assessments at drama school — a dreaded thrice yearly ordeal of performing a speech and poem, or worse, a song and poem in front of your entire year group as well as the full teaching faculty, writing utensils readied in judgemental knuckle-white hands. Not to get lost on too much of a tangent here but the pieces had to be thematically coupled and if they weren’t, it would go down about as well as a weak link to the brief on Great British Menu.

I don’t actually remember what I decided to pair Bog Queen with in the end but I do know that I chose it because it made me feel rooted and safe. I find that with all of Heaney’s work. There is something so profoundly grounded inherent in all of his creations as well as a numinous majesty which I equally revere. You can feel the fortitude of the cool damp peaty soil of Ireland underneath your bare feet, holding you up. You can smell the earth as if washed clean after a storm. You can feel the electric verve of lush greenness, flush with life. Heaney’s work is inseparably Irish in that way. There is also a weight to his poetry. A gravitas. An undeniable confidence. And a deep, meaningful sense of comfort too, of home; like a proper hug, a log-fire, a mug of hot chocolate. He is who I will forever turn to in times of instability and the poem I am sharing below is one especially for the writers, whenever they might be feeling uncertain. It is as much about purpose as it is about process and I adore it.

When Seamus Heaney responded to our director’s email, first up he said he would be delighted to come and see the show when it was on — he did and he was more gracious and kind than I could have ever imagined — then he wrote something that will stay with me always for it is something that I will perhaps forever be seeking to embody myself, though quite how I am not yet sure.

He said he didn’t want to make any changes to the script, he preferred not to tinker with his work once it had been published, ‘The thing is done’, he said.

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Digging

by 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 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.

Where do you reside on the spectrum of perfectionism? Can you let your work go once it’s out there in the world, like Heaney? If yes, HOW? Is it confidence? Is it surrender? Or are you like me, an endless editor: constantly re-reading, nit picking, refining? I’d love to hear from you.

I am now an affiliate of Bookshop.org so if you’d like to read more from any of the featured artists on our growing poetry curation, I have put together a selection on my page <3