On the Death of a Poet: RIP Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)

We arrived in Ireland, a motley group of poetry lovers (some faking it), on the day in 1995 that it was announced that Seamus Heaney had won the Noble Prize for Literature. I first learned the news from handmade signs in shop windows, in English and Irish, that were variations on the theme “Well done Seamus!” The sense of shared achievement and pride was palpable. “He’s one of ours” was in the air. It made me want to live in a small country.

One could lament that this could not—absolutely could not—happen in America. We do not prize the artful and incisive (as in the word ‘incision’—slicing to the heart of things) use of words. The death of a poet draws no attention, not, for instance, like the passing of drugged-up media creation (fill in a name).

But this is not a time for grousing and cliches about decadent cultures. It is time to celebrate—on the day of his death–that in one small country there was a man who took his place in a long tradition of such men and women and crafted language as best he could to help us understand this condition we call human.

So, really, rest in peace Seamus. You are one of ours.

(One of my grandfathers worked in the oil fields of California. The other worked the railroad in Kentucky. I see them both, and myself, in something like the way Heaney sees his father and grandfather and himself in the following poem—digging in my own way.)

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.