When you can't get it out of your head...

...maybe it's important. Usually, that's what I figure. And so, as I halfheartedly consider trying to reflect on my time in Tanzania, a line from a Seamus Heaney poem continues to come to mind. It's from his collection, The Spirit Level, from a poem called "Mint":

"My last things will be first things slipping from me."

What the heck, I should quote you the whole poem; it's only four stanzas.

Mint

It looked like a clump of small dusty nettles
Growing wild at the gable of the house
Beyond where we dumped our refuse and old bottles:
Unverdant ever, almost beneath notice.

But, to be fair, it also spelled promise
And newness in the back yard of our life
As if something callow yet tenacious
Sauntered in green alleys and grew rife.

The snip of scissor blades, the light of Sunday
Mornings when the mint was cut and loved:
My last things will be first things slipping from me.
Yet let all things go free that have survived.

Let the smells of mint go heady and defenceless
Like inmates liberated in that yard.
Like the disregarded ones we turned against
Because we'd failed them by our disregard.


I heard this poem for the first time in 1999, about three years after it was published, in the cool dark of the British Library near King's Cross Station in London. I went back time after time to the headphones hanging from one of several listening stations between old, glassed-in manuscripts, and pushed the button which would replay Heaney's scratchy, reassuring Irish voice reading his words. These headphones also played a poem from the same collection, "The Call." As the words and the lilt of his voice became familiar, I returned to them as one returns home after a journey, as one phones an old friend on a bad day and waits anxiously for the comfort of hearing her voice on the other end.

My parents bought me the tape recording of The Spirit Level in its entirety, and I have it here, having brought it and listened to some of it with Shera as part of our literature lessons. Now, returning to this poem, I hear new things. "...let all things go free that have survived." I refuse to apply this to myself because that seems incredibly presumptuous, yet I cannot keep myself from claiming it. This year I have learned a lot about persistence, waiting, and not waiting but choosing to speak, and about not needing to be right. I picture inmates liberated, walking about in a prison yard bewildered, not knowing what to do or where to go. "Yet let all things go free..."

I want to stop staring at my calendar, at my last four-ish weeks staring back at me. I want to live them well. I would also like to be a little less intense, but for now I suppose my ability to smile at the intensity is a good sign. :)

until next time. come back and read it again and hear the snip of scissor blades. come back when you feel unverdant ever.

love to friends near and far. And peace! great loads of it. [Hm. I think I am now speaking a troubling combination of British and American English. What can be done?]