Day 242. Between my finger and my thumb.

I was all set to post Blackberry-Picking over the next few weeks to accompany pictures of us doing just that. Our end of summer walks along a relatively undiscovered track, filling our pots with juicy berries and trying our best not to eat too many before heading home.

Then this morning I read the news that Seamus Heaney had died. I can remember devouring his poetry at school. I was never cool but unlike my 16 year old self, now I don't care.

At 6th form college I was relieved to be with other students who wanted to study the words of TS Eliot, Austen, Shakespeare, O'Casey and Heaney. My text books were easily identifiable by their broken spines, scrawled notes and sellotaped jackets.

On twitter there has been an outpouring of love for his incredible talent. His ability to keep us grounded in ordinary life with its joy and sadness, it's excitement and monotony. Taking us from the romance of expectation to the harshness of reality through simple language that's cleverly constructed.

Many people have been quoting from their favourite poems today. Mid-term break is a clear favourite with its poignant, gut wrenching final line 'a four foot box, a foot for every year'.

For me there are two pieces I have reread today (after many, many times before). Limbo tormented me for days after I first read it; the suffering of this woman driven to kill her baby because of the strength of her religion. Here's an extract.

.... But I'm sure
As she stood in the shadows
Ducking him tenderly 

Till the frozen knobs of her wrists
Were dead as the gravel,
He was a minnow with hooks
Tearing her open.

But it's Digging that I'm drawn to again and again. I'm the next generation in my family. My Dad was a grafter, toiling away as a telephone engineer, rarely to be found sitting down, always working on some project or other. Still now, in his late 70s, he keeps a list of jobs, written on a piece of paper in his distinctive script, it's comforting and constant. He never stops. My job is the polar opposite. I spend my days writing, planning and creating 'stuff'.  In fact after I graduated my Dad and I worked at the same company - with me in management and him in the field. Thankfully not in the same part of the business; he was very proud but I felt conscious of my position. Digging with its undertones of guilt and sense of alienation - I can relate to that. Not because of them, because of me.

So as the final page turns in the life of Seamus Heaney, his squat pen never again to rest in his hand, here it is. Take the time to read it if you haven't before. It really is a remarkable poem.

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.

By Seamus Heaney