Follower

my grandfather plowing

Howard County, Indiana

early 1930's

Follower


My father worked with a horse-plough,
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 hob-nailed 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.


Seamus Heaney

I admire the connection of the Irish and their land. "The only thing

worth working for, worth fighting for, worth dying for," as Gerald

O'Hara tells Scarlett in Gone With the Wind.

.
Heaney, born April 13, 1939, is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer
who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. He currently
lives in Dublin.

.

Portrait of Seamus Heaney by Edward McGuire, 1974.