Kate Meyer-Currey

Who will say death?

–to Seamus Heaney

He dug deep into the layered
peat of personal and collective
inheritances. His pen was the
spade which revealed the roots
which held him fast to his place
and time. But they spread from
the fertile soil of his curious mind,
with its dormant tuber thoughts,
like sly potato shoots, branching
out to infiltrate other deaths. He
saw photographic relics of other
lives preserved in print’s cold
storage, overwintering them in
the barn of his memory. He wrote
of his connection with these
enigmatic bog-mired sacrificial
victims: Tollund Man, Grauballe
Man. To him they evoked the
faces of fieldworking forebears;
embodied in his grandfather,
grounded in past and present.
He retraced their each furrowed
wrinkle and ploughshared frown-
line as if they delineated patterns
of his own familiar fields. His crow’s
eye sought leazings at the margins
of a still stubbled jaw. He saw the
dreams of sunlight that twitched
behind each dead man’s sunken lids,
eye-balls still full like ripened kernels
of their lost summers, dozing in the
midday heat. He tasted the drugged
millet gruel lying heavy in each belly’s
shriveled sack. He felt the horsefly
bite of the rawhide tourniquet that
stung their throats as their hides
shivered, as strangled breath strained
from their lungs’ spent bellows. His
unflinching gaze saw the truth of
what these other deaths were to
him. They did not stay buried in
the obtuse earth, suffocated by
its density; bundled like hay-bales
into time’s sucking mire. He was
their breath of resurrection, that
rose through his words like mist-
vapours over the fenland sedges;
calling them to join him at their
long days’ end.

Kate Meyer-Currey was born in 1969 and moved to Devon in 1973. A varied career in frontline settings has fueled her interest in gritty urbanism, contrasted with a rural upbringing. Her ADHD also instils a sense of ‘other’ in her life and writing.