Amid the reports of war in Syria, I completely brushed over the news that Irish poet, Seamus Heaney passed away. Heaney was born in County Derry in 1939, on a farm called Mossbawn. In many ways, that place is still the center of his poetic world, its omphalos. Heaney used the word to describe the farm, turning the word itself into a kind of sonic vehicle. In that way Heaney brought a sense of irish renaissance, or more accurately, a rebirth of Northern Irish poetry. Seamus Heaney’s conceptions of powerful informed regionalistic poetry earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.
Digging
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 we was digging.
The course boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my fingers and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
From Squarings
xlviii
Strange how things in the offing, once they’re sensed,
Convert to things foreknown;
And how what’s come upon its manifest
Only in light of what has been gone through.
Seventh heaven may be
The whole truth of a sixth sense come to pass.
At any rate, when light breaks over me
The way it did on the road beyond Coleraine
Where wind got saltier, the sky more hurried
And silver lamé shivered on the Bann
Out in mid-channel between the painted poles,
That day I’ll be in step with what escaped me.
Rambling Navajo Girl 
Apt choices of his work, thank you.
It’s been several months now and I still feel a great sense of loss when I think about him gone.