An old friend returned home from a 2 year African odyssey today (welcome home Sammy) so I wanted to post something with a world music vibe in his honour. This is released on Sofrito Records – “home of the tropical discotheque.” A pretty good claim to fame.
Said buddy and I have also been having a transcontinental email conversation about our shared appreciation of Seamus Heaney. Particularly how his poetry reminds us of home, heartening us from places far and not so far from there. See below a favourite from his latest collection that conjures an image of home for me as vividly as anything i have ever read.
The Baler
All day the clunk of a baler
Ongoing, cardiac-dull,
So taken for granted
It was evening before I came to
To what I was hearing
And missing: summer’s richest hours
As they had been to begin with,
Fork-lifted, sweated-through
And nearly rewarded enough
By the giddied-up race of a tractor
At the end of the day
Last-lapping a hayfield.
But what I also remembered
As woodpigeons sued at the edge
Of thirty gleaned acres
And I stood inhaling the cool
In a dusk eldorado
Of mighty cylindrical bales
Was Derek Hill’s saying,
The last time he sat at our table,
He could bear no longer to watch
The sun going down
And asking please to be put
With his back to the window.