Friday, August 13, 2010 1:20 PM
highly literary, with occasional grammar slips
Digging
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as 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 could 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, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mold, 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.
Seamus Heaney
- from Death of a Naturalist (1966)
12:59 PM
highly literary, with occasional grammar slips
tech idiot, who?just a little self-indulgent after furnishing the blog.
there's nothing like a good ol' clean-up to make me feel like writing again. i can't even begin to tell you how critical i have been on myself since i started exposing my penmanship to the myriad of editors. let's just say, i stopped writing to make myself feel better.
i told myself a couple of months ago to lock up my lexicon of literary language. writing in the papers is all about the objectivity and the immediacy. you need to push forward the news point, simplify your words and make it sharp and clean. well, that was how i was taught and that was how i should write, i reckon.
but nearly three months down the writer's path, i missed the summer-sweet flowers, the whiffs of fresh lavender and the touch of my pen. my pen. and also because i think my editors don't mind an occasional literary intoxication.
but don't take me wrongly, SPH has been smashin!
i kept pinching myself to make sure i was in real life - how can anything called Work be so amazing? how can waking up at 7am to watch out for errant cyclists at Sembawang MRT station feel so good?
and i think i heard a piece of puzzle fitted nicely into its place somewhere in the Higher Place. that's why, that's why.
i can't help but thank God.
