Digging, and Blackberry Picking

Blackberries are ripening in the hedgerows on our farm, so I picked some.

This gives me an excuse to remember the late, great, Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who died on 30 August 2013.  Seamus Heaney was born in Northern Ireland, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.”

In honour of Seamus Heaney, here is a link to his poem entitled “Blackberry Picking”, and another photo showing “the glossy purple clot among others, red, green, hard as a knot”.

Another popular Heaney poem is “Digging”.   My family is a good example of the generational shift between working the land and working with words, as described in that poem.

“But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.   Between my finger and my thumb the squat pen rests.  I’ll dig with it.”

I know – it’s a fork (or, in the local dialect, a grape) not a spade.  But I liked the sunlight on the grass behind it.

By the way, do you see how different the dark Irish soil is from the red soil of South India in the next photo of Clovergreens Golf Club?