I took a poetry class a long time ago. I enjoyed it and thought it would be fun and fairly easy because I’ve always loved and written poems. How wrong I was. My teacher wasn’t impressed with most of my poems. In the beginning, I turned in poems I had previously written, hoping for praise and validation for my poetry writing skills. How young and foolish I was.
She immediately smelled my laziness and I deserved her disinterest and critical remarks. So, as the class continued, I started writing new poems. I listened and read the other students work. I studied and practiced different forms. And I discovered many forms I loved and enjoyed writing. And then I went further and reached into my emotional arsenal and pulled out some pretty decent lines and stanzas. It was tough, getting praise from my teacher, but I finally did. I needed to put in the work, take the assignments seriously and write from my soul. I was very young back then and that class and everything I learned stayed with me, not only with writing poetry but all my writing. Always be authentic and never be lazy.
She gave a handout to everyone in her class that I kept all these years. It’s a poem by an Irish poet named Seamus Heaney called Digging. It’s from his 1966 book titled From the Death of a Naturalist. I’ve read that it’s about vocation, specifically Heaney’s feelings about his vocation.
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 course boot nestled on the log, 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 own
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.
I love this poem! How do you feel about it? Are you digging today?
Do you think Seamus chose the right vocation?
The Second Chance Writer 