Blessed are they who can honor their parents.

                  I couldn’t – and it hurts.

                  Maybe that’s why these two poems by Seamus Heaney keep wafting into my sleep like smoke from a cottage fire. Breathe them, first individually, then side by side, to assess their effect.

                  (My apologies for appending more words than my missive – and such words! – but my object here is to kindle. Any discussion worth having is insufficient – and incomplete.)

                 Are you wounded yet?  Wooed? Wowed? It is not Heaney’s elegance that moves me – his music is seldom hummable – but his earthy tone and stubborn heart. Here is no “peasant poet” – that quaint, condescending Romantic conceit – but a soul like any, with origins that are what they are, no boast or complaint, just facts. For certain his parents were humble, not their Nobel laureate lad, but that didn’t make them inferior; their rugged naturalness and inarticulate devotion made them somehow more honorable, heroes even. Listen: 

By God, the old man could handle a spade.   

Just like his old man.

Fear of affectation made her affect

Inadequacy whenever it came to

Pronouncing words 'beyond her'. Bertold Brek.

She'd manage something hampered and askew

Every time, as if she might betray

The hampered and inadequate by too

Well-adjusted a vocabulary.

With more challenge than pride, she'd tell me, 'You

Know all them things.'

Love is about doing one’s best, not being better.

                  Regret swamps me. Oh, to admire my parents for who they were, not to rebuke them in retrospect for what they weren’t. No son prefers to be an ingrate. Our instinct is to honor our predecessors, install them like penates in our vestibule, observe yahrzeits with sweet remorse. Only I can’t. My parents oppressed me with propriety, misled with mistaken values, denied any show of love. My slow maturation I attribute to the slog of sloughing them. How they wanted me to be like themselves whom, deep down, they didn’t much like.

                  I wrote, I’m pretty sure, to right myself. I read for that reason – for balance – to walk aright. Which is why I don’t really know how excellent these two poems are, due to the surge of emotions they arouse. Analysis can glean brilliancies – Heaney was a poet who hid his craft beneath gruffness – laboring amiably – and successfully – not to be the smartest guy in the room. (The Irish possess an outsized gift for being mates.)

                  Now wouldn’t you know it, I’ve made my little Heaney accolade more about me than his poems. But there is no just way to read a poem, for it is a relation, an intimacy, to which one must bring the only heart one has. I cannot read these two poems without tearing up. Oh for even a posthumous embrace of my begetters!

                  The only wrong way to read a poem is as you ought. Were I a professor – heaven help me – I’d force my students to express how they felt about the words before them, before fumbling to explain why. Claudius’ question to Hamlet, “Why seems it so particular with thee?” – far from a reproach, would be the seed of thought.

                  Heaney’s dad taught him to dig – not with a spade for potatoes, but for poems with a pen. His mom gave him an acute awareness of words and defiance of formulaic hypocrisy. My parents armed me for rebellion against a religion I rated wrong. Gifts all. Parents provide our ingredients, it’s up to us what we make of them.

Day and night my tears have been my bread.

* 

Two by Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)

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.

 Clearances

In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984

She taught me what her uncle once taught her:

How easily the biggest coal block split

If you got the grain and hammer angled right.

The sound of that relaxed alluring blow, 

Its co-opted and obliterated echo,

Taught me to hit, taught me to loosen,

Taught me between the hammer and the block

To face the music. Teach me now to listen,

To strike it rich behind the linear black.

                            1.                  

A cobble thrown a hundred years ago

Keeps coming at me, the first stone

Aimed at a great-grandmother's turncoat brow.

The pony jerks and the riot's on.

She's crouched low in the trap

Running the gauntlet that first Sunday

Down the brae to Mass at a panicked gallop.

He whips on through the town to cries of 'Lundy!'

Call her 'The Convert'. 'The Exogamous Bride'.

Anyhow, it is a genre piece

Inherited on my mother's side

And mine to dispose with now she's gone.

Instead of silver and Victorian lace,

The exonerating, exonerated stone.

  2.

Polished linoleum shone there. Brass taps shone.

The china cups were very white and big—

An unchipped set with sugar bowl and jug.

The kettle whistled. Sandwich and tea scone

Were present and correct. In case it run,

The butter must be kept out of the sun.

And don't be dropping crumbs. Don't tilt your chair.

Don't reach. Don't point. Don't make noise when you stir.

It is Number 5, New Row, Land of the Dead,

Where grandfather is rising from his place

With spectacles pushed back on a clean bald head

To welcome a bewildered homing daughter

Before she even knocks. 'What's this? What's this?'

And they sit down in the shining room together.

                                              3

When all the others were away at Mass

I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.

They broke the silence, let fall one by one

Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:

Cold comforts set between us, things to share

Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.

And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes

From each other's work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside

Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying

And some were responding and some crying

I remembered her head bent towards my head,

Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives—

Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

                                               4

Fear of affectation made her affect

Inadequacy whenever it came to

Pronouncing words 'beyond her'. Bertold Brek.

She'd manage something hampered and askew

Every time, as if she might betray

The hampered and inadequate by too

Well-adjusted a vocabulary.

With more challenge than pride, she'd tell me, 'You

Know all them things.' So I governed my tongue

In front of her, a genuinely well-

Adjusted adequate betrayal

Of what I knew better. I'd naw and aye

And decently relapse into the wrong

Grammar which kept us allied and at bay.

                                                5

The cool that came off sheets just off the line

Made me think the damp must still be in them

But when I took my corners of the linen

And pulled against her, first straight down the hem

And then diagonally, then flapped and shook

The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,

They made a dried-out undulating thwack.

So we'd stretch and fold and end up hand to hand

For a split second as if nothing had happened

For nothing had that had not always happened

Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,

Coming close again by holding back

In moves where I was x and she was o

Inscribed in sheets she'd sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.

                                               6

In the first flush of the Easter holidays

The ceremonies during Holy Week

Were highpoints of our Sons and Lovers phase.

The midnight fire. The paschal candlestick.

Elbow to elbow, glad to be kneeling next

To each other up there near the front

Of the packed church, we would follow the text

And rubrics for the blessing of the font.

As the hind longs for the streams, so my soul. . .

Dippings. Towellings. The water breathed on.

The water mixed with chrism and with oil.

Cruet tinkle. Formal incensation

And the psalmist's outcry taken up with pride:

Day and night my tears have been my bread.

                                                7

In the last minutes he said more to her

Almost than in all their life together.

'You'll be in New Row on Monday night

And I'll come up for you and you'll be glad

When I walk in the door . . . Isn't that right?'

His head was bent down to her propped-up head.

She could not hear but we were overjoyed.

He called her good and girl. Then she was dead,

The searching for a pulsebeat was abandoned

And we all knew one thing by being there.

The space we stood around had been emptied

Into us to keep, it penetrated

Clearances that suddenly stood open.

High cries were felled and a pure change happened.

                                                8

I thought of walking round and round a space

Utterly empty, utterly a source

Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place

In our front hedge above the wallflowers.

The white chips jumped and jumped and skited high.

I heard the hatchet's differentiated

Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh

And collapse of what luxuriated

Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all.

Deep-planted and long gone, my coeval

Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole,

Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere,

A soul ramifying and forever

Silent, beyond silence listened for.