nastya ’s Reviews > The Poems of Seamus Heaney > Status Update

Shit! This actually hit. I was doing some stuff around the house yesterday and my 5-yr-old wanted to help with everything which was making it slow as hell and I was getting very impatient and short with her. I am the father that will one day be stumbling. Thanks for the unintentionally induced reflection!

She sounds adorable! This is the whole poem:
Follower
BY SEAMUS HEANEY
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 hobnailed 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.