Distant

Blencathra

Yesterday I saw a child flying a kite. Heaney instantly came to mind and I nearly posted that with his poem but it lost out to the trees and Emily. Today as I walked across the frozen fields and an area of rough moorland I flushed a snipe. Too much of a co-incidence I reckoned with the air so full of lost souls. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a snipe so Heaney it is today.

A Kite for Michael and Christopher - Seamus Heaney

All through that Sunday afternoon
a kite flew above Sunday,
a tightened drumhead, an armful of blown chaff.

I'd seen it grey and slippy in the making,
I'd tapped it when it dried out white and stiff,
I'd tied the bows of newspaper
along its six-foot tail.

But now it was far up like a small black lark
and now it dragged as if the bellied string
were a wet rope hauled upon
to lift a shoal.

My friend says that the human soul
is about the weight of a snipe,
yet the soul at anchor there,
the string that sags and ascends,
weigh like a furrow assumed into the heavens.

Before the kite plunges down into the wood
and this line goes useless
take in your two hands, boys, and feel
the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.
You were born fit for it.
Stand in here in front of me
and take the strain.