Digging
by Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)
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.
....
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
....
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.
From Death of a Naturalist (1996)
Heaney won the Nobel prize in Literature in 1995. The first edition of the Death of a Naturalist Heaney contributed to an auction in aid of the writers' charity Pen and he wrote in pencil above the poem "At a Potato Digging" that the critic "Anthony Thwaite once described me (to my face) as 'laureate of the root vegetable'".