Heaney+At+a+Potato+Digging

AT A POTATO DIGGING

1 A mechanical digger wrecks the drill, Spins up shower of roots and mould. Labourers swarm in behind, stoop to fill Wicker creels. Fingers go dead in the cold.

Like crows attacking crow-black fields, they stretch A higgledy line from hedge to headland; Some pairs keep breaking ragged ranks to fetch A full creel to the pit and straighten, stand

Tall for a moment but soon stumble back To fish a new load from the crumbled surf. Heads bow, trunks bend, hands fumble towards the black Mother. Processional stooping through the turf

Recurs mindlessly as autumn. Centuries Of fear and homage to the famine god Toughen the muscles behind their humbled knees, Make a seasonal altar of the sod.

11 Flint-white, purple. They lie scattered like inflated pebbles. Native to the black clutch of clay where the halved seed shot and clotted these knobbed and slit-eyed tubers seem the petrified hearts of drills. Split by the spade, they show white as cream.

Good smells exude from crumbled earth. The rough bark of humus erupts knots of potatoes ( a clean birth ) whose solid feel, whose wet inside promises taste of ground and root. To be piled in pits; live skulls, blind-eyed.

III

Live skulls, blind-eyed, balanced on wild higgledy skeletons scoured the land in 'forty-five wolfed the blighted root and died.

The new potato, sound as stone, putrefied when it had lain three days in the long clay pit. Millions rotted along with it.

Mouths tightened in, eyes died hard, faces chilled to plucked bird. In a million wicker huts beaks of famine snipped at guts.

A people hungering from birth, grubbing, like plants, in the bitch earth, were grafted with a great sorrow. Hope rotted like a marrow.

Stinking potatoes fouled the land pits turned pus into filthy mounds: and where potato diggers are you still smell the running sore.

IV Under a gay flotilla of gulls The rhythm deadens, the workers stop. Brown bread and tea in bright canfuls Are served for lunch. Dead-beat, they flop

Down in the ditch and take their fill, Thankfully breaking timeless fasts; Then, stretched on the faithless ground, spill Libations of cold tea, scatter crusts.

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