DIGGING

(Death of a Naturalist, 1966)

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.

BOGLAND (Door into the Dark, 1969)

We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encroaching horizon,
Is wooed into the cyclops eye
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun.

Theyve taken the skeleton

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft Of the Great Irish Elk
Against the inside knee was levered firmly. Out of the peat, set it up
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright
An astounding crate full of air.
edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Butter sunk under
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
More than a hundred years
Was recovered salty and white.
By God, the old man could handle a spade. The ground itself is kind, black butter
Just like his old man.
Melting and opening underfoot,
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Missing its last definition
Than any other man on Toners bog.
By millions of years.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Theyll never dig coal here,
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened
up
Only the waterlogged trunks
To drink it, then fell to right away
of great firs, soft as pulp.
Nicking and slicing neatly, heavy sods
Our pioneers keep striking
Over his shoulder, going down and down
Inwards and downwards,
For the good turf. Digging.
Every layer they strip
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelsh Seems camped on before.
and slap
The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
The wet centre is bottomless.
Through living roots awaken in my head.
From THE BOG QUEEN (North, 1975)
But Ive no spade to follow men like them.
Ruminant ground
Between my finger and my thumb
digestion of mollusc
The squat pen rests.
and seed-pod,
Ill dig with it.
deep pollen-bin.

Earth-pantry, bone-vault,
sun-bank, embalmer
of votive goods
and sabred fugitives.

Hercules lifts his arms

in a remorseless V,
his triumph unassailed
by the powers he has shaken

Insatiable bride,
Sword-swallower,
casket, midden,
floe of history.

and lifts and banks Antaeus

high as a profiled ridge,
a sleeping giant,
pap for the dispossessed.

HERCULES AND ANTAEUS

Sky-born and royal,
snake-choker, dung-heaver,
his mind big with golden apples,
his future hung with trophies,
Hercules has the measure
of resistance and black powers
feeding off the territory.
Antaeus, the mould-hugger,
is weaned at last:
a fall was a renewal
but now he is raised up the challengers intelligence
is a spur of light,
a blue prong graiping him
out of his element
into a dream of loss
and origins - the cradling dark,
the river-veins, the secret gullies
of his strength,
the hatching grounds
of cave and souterrain
he has bequethed it all
to elegists. Balor will die
and Byrthnoth and Sitting Bull.