Seamus Heaney — The First Flight

It was more sleepwalk than spasm yet that was a time when the times were also in spasm - the ties and the knots running through us split open down the lines of the grain. As I drew close to pebbles and berries, the smell of wild garlic, relearning the acoustic of frost and the meaning of woodnote, my shadow over the field was only a spin-off, my empty place an excuse for shifts in the camp, old rehearsals of debts and betrayal. Singly they came to the tree with a stone in each pocket to whistle and bill me back in and I would collide and cascade through leaves when they left, my point of repose knocked askew. I was mired in attachment until they began to pronounce me a feeder off battlefields so I mastered new rungs of the air to survey out of reach their bonfires on hills, their hosting and fasting, the levies from Scotland as always, and the people of art diverting their rhythmical chants to fend off the onslaught of winds I would welcome and climb at the top of my bent.