5. Unchanging truths: growing up

Amidst so many shifting certainties and different priorities, there are always, of course, the eternal themes such as love, parting, youth and age which poets over the centuries have portrayed.

An example of this is my take on Seamus Heaney’s Blackberry Picking. Here, I draw on my own early childhood memories when my beloved father and I would go together each September to pick blackberries:

“….I thought it a great privilege, back then,
That he so generously let me follow him
On these adventures, just the two of us.

Now, I believe he found a kind of grace
In my presence, that I would eagerly agree
To come with him – he knew I’d soon outgrow
His company. I was so proud to help this enterprise,
Never imagining the cruel time would come,
Taking me, though not my father, by surprise,
When I would be impatient to leave home,
Having, I thought, much better things to do,
Seeking strange fruit and prickly thickets new.”

Next: Unchanging truths: the two contrary states of the human soul