
“Personal Helicon” by Seamus Heaney
for Michael Longley
As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.
Once, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.
A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.
Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.
Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet, wrote the above poem that is shared here in honor of Saint Patrick’s Day! Yet it’s the picture that Heaney brings in this poem that led to choosing it. The images of childhood that Heaney presented—a child with a love for water wells and all of the mystery and excitement they might contain, the fingers that “pry into roots” and become slimy. Alas, Heaney owns the fact that returning to the activities of his childhood is “beneath all adult dignity.” What a brief period of freedom and imagination that childhood is! What has become acutely apparent in the past few weeks is how the Farm at Hawthorne Valley presents itself as a beacon of opportunity for such moments of freedom during childhood. We are so fortunate to be at a place with a farm school! For the children to be given opportunities—perhaps each day, perhaps just once or twice a week—to work, walk, observe, smell, see, hear, touch, maybe to taste the farm with all of their senses and their whole selves is a gift that can’t possibly be measured. The external stimuli that a farm experience provides also happen to be the very same things that create healthy brain development. No time on a screen can provide that—healthy neural pathways depend on multi-sensory experiences; a walk around the farm provides that in one fun, easy swoop. [caption id="attachment_8123" align="alignleft" width="225"]