The Fine Print Of Purgatory - For Seamus Heaney Poem by Keith Shorrocks Johnson

Like Seamus Heaney, I was a farmer’s boy
Or rather I became one
When I was four and signed my lease
In hearts’ loss -
Paying my ingoings
In mud and shit and love.

I too saw kittens drown -
And pigs slaughtered
Squealing at hell’s gate,
Blood caught in an old tin bath -
And dogs shot in the drive
Slinking as the 22 rose and leveled.

There can’t be many of us
Who felt white-washed walls
In the dark, as the cows respired -
Smelled the poetry there,
Looking up the stock at night
By torch and latch and moonlight.

Those cattle died of plague
And ended in a bulldozed pit
Near the stack-yard –
And my almost father
Broke his heart for loss
While I was bush-bashing outback tracks.

Few I’m sure will know now
The turnip shredder in the picture
Or have eaten a slice cold from the handle swing.
Now and again, we used to feed turnips
To my Connemara pony Jonty
Before he was knackered by a winter’s standing.

There is cruelty then in much remembering -
But life it was in deeds that dated
With death foreshadowed in a codicil.