April is National Poetry Month. I’m sharing a poem from one of my favorite Irish poets, and the influence he had on me.
I recently traveled to my childhood home in Ireland and spent time with my frail elderly parents, a privileged, moving experience.
During one such trip, I visited a nearby exhibition of the life, literature and inspiration of Seamus Heaney (1939-2013). Heaney was a poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. He grew up close to me in County Derry and he is our pride and joy.
In addition to his literary translations and academic research, Heaney wrote of the local, rural, and domestic. His poems are stark and spare, yet radiant and brilliant.
I have always loved Heaney’s poems, not just for their lyrical beauty but for their very existence. I was shocked that the people and places of my humble childhood and simple landscape were worthy of verse and praise.
Shocked that a rural Catholic from a large family, poor stoney farm, cutting turf out of the ancient earth for the fire, exactly like me, was celebrated, not just as the village bard but by the world of letters, Oxford, Harvard, by the other great writers of his time and finally, the ultimate validation, the Nobel prize! By acknowledging his work, they ratified our existence, which otherwise felt a little shameful.
Visiting the Seamus Heaney Homeplace, I was struck by two things. Not just once again by the cadence of his speech and the power of his work.
But also what he had to teach us as writers, speakers, presenters.
He showed us that our own experience is trustworthy. He urged us to write about our personal memories, not just to preserve them but to open up the experiences and move them along and make them current.
So, fresh from a review of this master’s work, I encourage all of us to trust our experience, let the memories of our childhood, teenage years, adulthood connect to and illuminate our present and move us along perhaps, if we are lucky enough, to “a glimpse of wholeness”.
And to, per the words on Seamus Heaney’s plain gravestone,
“Walk on Air, against your better judgment.”
Follower
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horses strained at his clicking tongue.
An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.
The sod rolled over without breaking.
At the headrig, with a single pluck
Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly.
I stumbled in his hobnailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back
Dipping and rising to his plod.
I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.
I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.
