Fosterling
by Seamus Heaney
At school I loved one picture's heavy greenness –
Horizons rigged with windmills' arms and sails.
The millhouses' still outlines. Their in-placeness
Still more in place when mirrored in canals.
I can't remember not ever having known
The immanent hydraulics of a land
Of glar and glit and floods at dailigone.
My silting hope. My lowlands of the mind.
Heaviness of being. And poetry
Sluggish in the doldrums of what happens.
Me waiting until I was nearly fifty
To credit marvels. Like the tree-clock of tin cans
The tinkers made. So long for air to brighten,
Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.
Nostalgia is often what it takes for me to appreciate the power of noticing. Heaney too reflecting on a picture in his old classroom and how his interests in the everyday finally ignited ‘waiting until I was nearly fifty/To credit marvels.' The council have redesigned the park behind my childhood home. It's a fairly large park, and once had two dusty and untended football pitches with rusted goals. Now it's fresh Astro and they've twisted the fields at an angle to the old ground to make an altogether more professional look to the whole park. The pitches are used more often and there's blocked out time in the booking schedule (such a system unthinkable in my childhood) for girls' training. It's a good thing. But that doesn't stop it feeling strange.
Like Heaney here, a heaviness of being characterised my growing up- particularly the teenage years. Fearing I was never quite going to live up to whatever potential I had (my own ‘silting hope'), I trod a path that might resemble the kinds of hopes I thought others had. That's all changed now. Living at a retreat centre and doing DIY, I find myself at last with ‘Time to be dazzled.' It makes everything feel that bit lighter.