Digging

Day 3: write in the Spanish form called a “glosa” – literally a poem that glosses, or explains, or in some way responds to another poem. The idea is to take a quatrain from a poem that you like, and then write a four-stanza poem that explains or responds to each line of the quatrain, with each of the quatrain’s four lines in turn forming the last line of each stanza. Traditionally, each stanza has ten lines, but don’t feel obligated to hold yourself to that!

Few of my favourite poets write in quatrain,  but I've found a four line section in Seamus Heaney's Digging. 

This small square patch of land

Lovingly tended each weekend -

Despite the back breaking strain 

Of digging, weeding, planting,

Earthing up, watering, weeding once again -

Has fed generations of families

With their staple comfort food;

Each seasoned nose and ears familiar with

The predictable annual cycle,

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap. 

The art of digging a productive potato bed

Cannot be gleaned from books alone.  

It must be learnt at the practised elbow 

Of the generation that came before, 

Absorbed through watching the care taken

To keep the spade's edge keen, it's shaft true, 

It's heft just right for the job in hand. 

Learning the placement of the digging foot, 

The sound of the blade slicing each patch

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge.   

I grew up ignorant of such things -

My family tended no allotments.

Our potatoes were bought from urban stalls,

Filled the bottom of my mother's bag

Buried under carrots,  onions,  greens.

Watching now at my husband's elbow

I'm rather too old an apprentice

To learn what must be done, the when and why. 

My skill lies elsewhere, thoughts emerging

Through living roots awakened in my head.

I'll leave the spade work to him reluctanty, 

Won't break my back through unskilled technique.

Instead I'll take up my pen and notebook, 

My task to turn and sift each word and image

Place each line break, choose each punctuation mark

Until they conjure the rhythm of slice, turn, fold, 

The skill of growing meals from seed. 

Some part of me regrets the lack of physicality, 

My sedentary need to turn things in to words:

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

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