Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

April is a good month for poetry-lovers.

Just a partial list of April’s birthdays includes: Edmond Rostand, Maya Angelou, Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Wordsworth, Louise Gluck, Charlotte Brontë, Robert Penn Warren, Walter del la Mare, Ted Kooser, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Carolyn Forché, Constantine Cavafy, Annie Dillard, and of course, the greatest of them all, William Shakespeare.

This week’s Word Cloud poet is Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), who was born on April 13, in Northern Ireland, but lived much of his life in Dublin. Heaney is as famous for his translations as he is for his own poems. As a guide to Ireland’s past and present, and to
the ancient world of Myth and Legend, he has few peers.

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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.

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