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one irish, the other american
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.
______________
TPB's notes:
shame on us, we've never until now read a single 'famous seamus' 'keeper of language' seamus heaney poem, irish poet and clearly well-loved who passed away today at 74.
/TPB
other notes: Seamus Heaney, "Digging" from Death of a Naturalist. Copyright 1966 by Seamus Heaney. Reprinted with the permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC.
_____________________
ETHERIDGE KNIGHT
For Freckle-Faced Gerald
Now you take ol Rufus. He beat drums,
was free and funky under the arms,
fucked white girls, jumped off a bridge
(and thought nothing of the sacrilege),
he copped out—and he was over twenty-one.
Take Gerald. Sixteen years hadn’t even done
a good job on his voice. He didn’t even know
how to talk tough, or how to hide the glow
of life before he was thrown in as “pigmeat”
for the buzzards to eat.
Gerald, who had no memory or hope of copper hot lips—
or firm upthrusting thighs
to reinforce his flow,
let tall walls and buzzards change the course
of his river from south to north.
(No safety in numbers, like back on the block:
two’s aplenty. three? definitely not.
four? “you’re all muslims.”
five? “you were planning a race riot.”
plus, Gerald could never quite win
with his precise speech and innocent grin
the trust and fists of the young black cats.)
Gerald, sun-kissed ten thousand times on the nose
and cheeks, didn’t stand a chance,
didn’t even know that the loss of his balls
had been plotted years in advance
by wiser and bigger buzzards than those
who now hover above his track
and at night light upon his back.
__________
TPB's notes: here's what etheridge knight says on his poem above:
Genesis of “For Freckled-Faced Gerald”
I was lying in my cell reading one night, when all the guys came in. I had been working on the prison newspaper and had gotten off work early. When they came in, the word came that a young brother had been raped in the prison laundry by some older cons.
At the time I was reading James Baldwin’s Another Country. You remember that in the novel Rufus commits suicide. I got a little angry. Here was this young brother—only sixteen and in prison. Also, at the same time he came into the joint, there were about five or six youngsters in there. But he was the youngest. There was also a young white boy from Indianapolis who had burglarized some home and shot some people. He had gotten life, too. When he came to prison, the warden made him houseboy and kept him outside the walls—protected him.
But the warden put Gerald back inside the wall because he was just a nigger. I was thinking of all of that. And I was thinking about Baldwin’s character, Rufus, who committed suicide. And here was Gerald struggling to survive. (Suicide is such an uncommon thing among black people. We kill ourselves through alcohol or drugs, or we kill each other. But direct suicide is uncommon.) I wrote that poem that night.
All of those things led up to it. I was trying to express what I saw happening around me and to talk about the subject of oppression. Here we are—black people, oppressed. In this country, we are oppressed racially and sexually. Women are oppressed. Homosexuals in prison and in the larger society are oppressed. If you are black, a woman, a lesbian and you’re in prison, you are oppressed four times.
Black men will talk about being free, yet they’ll have a woman walking four paces behind them and go “fag hunting.” We cannot win our freedom at the expense of anybody. Many blacks—artists, educators, politicians, and other leaders—will say there’s nothing to women’s liberation or gay liberation. Or they will argue that if we have to become fascists to win our freedom, it’s better for us to have the oppressors in jail than for them to have us. But I don’t feel that way; I don’t think we can be free that way.
I don’t think that conditions of the world would allow us to be free at the expense of anybody else. The Europeans were the last people to dominate the world racially. I don’t think we can dominate the world racially. If you’re going to come from a point of view of race, then the Chinese will win since there are more of them than anyone else. We cannot say that naturals are the best things in the world.
If we argue that way, the Chinese can say slanted eyes are the best. Since there are more of them, they would have to be right. I don’t think we can come from that. Everybody has to be free. I was feeling those things and thinking about Gerald when I wrote the poem. Why did Rufus kill himself? Was it because he was black, or was it because he was a homosexual? That’s how the poem came about.
- Etheridge Knight
source: http://www.nathanielturner.com/ etheridgeknightspeaks.htm
