Jamie A. Gergen

On Digging, a Response
to Seamus Heaney

As I stoop to pluck
a stubborn weed root,
I hear the rough scratch
of pen tip against paper
through the upstairs window.

The soil gives way much easier
in this pensioner’s garden.
The reward for forty long years
of digging potatoes and peat farming.

I hear a pause above,
followed by the muffled shuffle to the window.
I bend to drive the spade again;
my son thinks I was not listening.

Go and pen your works, son.
I knew potato farming wasn’t in you.
But my secret is this:
I dug potatoes so you wouldn’t have to.

Jamie Gergen is a poet, author, and graduate student at George Mason University in Virginia. He has worked in poetry, non-fiction, and fiction genres with poetry being his most developed genre. His poetry and fiction have been published in The Front Porch Review and Volition Magazine.