I just finished Wendell Berry’s book Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, and so “the endless connections between God and agriculture” have been on my mind alot lately. Seamus Heaney, my favorite contemporary poet, has a poem from his first book, Death of a Naturalist, that draws a provacative picture of peasant laborers as parishoners of an oppressive church. I also particularly enjoy Heaney’s early style that is on display here, with the heavilly alliterative Beowulf/Hopkins style of rhyming within the line. This is the first of four sections:
A mechanical digger wrecks the drill,
Spins up a dark 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.
I have just gone stoledid your poem.