Vocabulary in Digging

Short and thick in shape, sitting low and compact rather than tall and slender. Here it describes the pen as stubby and solid in the speaker's hand.

Fitting closely and comfortably, held firmly in place with no looseness or wobble. The pen sits in the fingers the way a gun fits a grip.

A digging tool with a flat, sharp-edged metal blade and a long handle, used for cutting into soil or turf. In this poem it stands for the manual labour of the speaker's ancestors.

The footrest — a small ledge or shoulder on the top of a spade's blade — that a digger pushes down with his boot to drive the blade into the ground.

Blocks of peat cut from a bog and dried for use as fuel. In Ireland, cutting turf was a traditional and essential form of labour for heating homes.

A wet, spongy area of ground made up of decomposed plant matter called peat. Irish bogs were worked for generations as a source of fuel cut in the form of turf.

Rectangular chunks of earth or peat sliced cleanly from the ground by a spade. Here they are the units of turf the grandfather cuts and stacks.

Making a harsh, scraping sound produced by one rough surface moving against another. The word captures the grating noise of a metal spade cutting into gravelly ground.

The long handle of a spade or similar tool, gripped and levered by the user to drive and steer the blade. The digger presses it against his knee for extra force.

Full of small stones and coarse grit mixed into the soil. It describes the texture of the ground being cut, which makes the spade's entry produce that rasping sound.

Abruptly brief and clean, with no wasted movement or words. Used here to describe the sharp, efficient cuts the father makes with the spade.

Cutting cleanly and precisely into a surface with a sharp edge, making a neat incision. The spade nicks the edge of the ground as the digger works with skilled accuracy.

Cutting smoothly through something in one clean, continuous stroke. The grandfather slices through the peat with effortless, practised skill.

Lifting something heavy with a strong, sustained effort. The grandfather heaves cut sods of peat up and away as part of the rhythmic work of the bog.

To use the pen as a tool of excavation the way a spade is used on earth — to uncover memory, language, and identity through writing rather than physical labour.