March Madness

Some good friends of mine here in Belfast presented me with a collection of Derry-born Seamus Heaney’s poetry for Christmas. It’s called Opened Ground, and basically outlines some of his best-known work between 1966 and 1996. Some of the poems go over my head a bit, and I have to do a bit of research to understand some of the main ideas. However, on the days when I find a spare minute to open the book, I’ll come across something that I can completely identify with in my experience here in Northern Ireland. I came across such a poem the other day:

Markings

We marked the pitch: four jackets for four goalposts,

That was all. The corners and the squares

Were there like longitude and latitude

Under the bumpy ground, to be

Agreed about or disagreed about

When the time came. And then we picked the teams

And crossed the line our called names drew between us.

Youngsters shouting their heads off in a field

As the light died and they kept on playing

Because by then they were playing in their heads

And the actual kicked ball came to them

Like a dream heaviness, and their own hard

Breathing in the dark and skids on grass

Sounded like effort in another world…

It was quick and constant, a game that never need

Be played out. Some limit had been passed,

There was fleetness, furtherance, untiredness

In time that was extra, unforeseen and free.

-Seamus Heaney (Seeing Things, 1991)

March has brought with it the first signs of spring in Belfast. The daffodils have perked their heads up – something I don’t normally see at home until about late April. They are everywhere and they are beautiful. Winter rains have kept the grass a bright green. The sun pops its head out a little more frequently now, which I have to say that I am quite fond of, and if you go for an afternoon drive around Belfast on one of these days, you will probably be able to see lambs trailing their mothers.

I’ve noticed as the days have gotten longer and the air has loosened its harsh chill that football games have reemerged in Ballybeen. Young boys pour out of their home to play football in the side field of Dundonald Methodist Church. A good fifteen to twenty can be found now, normally in the fashionable tracksuit, kicking up their knees, tearing turf, and yelling up a storm about what counts as a goal. It's much like what Heaney described it as in his poem. There's a lot of imagination in it. While these boys don't use jackets for goal posts, they have somehow resurrected old wooden chairs (that I think were in the dumpster behind the church) as goal posts. Sometimes they place Coke cans out on the field to mark the boundary lines as well. Last Thursday I finished cleaning up for the afterschools program, and began my way home down the massive sloped hill on which Dundonald Methodist Church sits. To my left came shrill shouts of "Go, go, go!," and I recognized Jake, one of the boys in our program jumping up and down, encouraging his friend Sam, to take the ball in for the goal. Sam bolted down the field with a footwork that circumnavigated two attempted blocks and set him up for a beautiful score. With his back slightly arched, he raised his leg in a sharp, smooth swing (something I can't seem to develop as naturally) and sent the ball past the gloved hands of a Manchester-United-clad young lad, and through the invisible goal created by the backs of two rotting chairs. With the way that Sam went running down the field, arms raised, palms outstreched and head tilted back, you would have thought that he had scored the winning goal of the World Cup. Amused, I sat down on the curb of the church driveway to watch for a few more minutes. As entertaining as it was to watch them bicker about which side received the ball, and whether a goal had actually been scored, there was a certain peace about watching the boys move back and forth across the "field." I suppose it probably had something to do with being able to just sit outside and enjoy a semi-warm evening, something that has been pretty rare for me during my stay here in Belfast. But I think it also had to do with the fascination I had with the boys' sense of imagination - how they created something out of what we would call nothing, how time transformed into "something extra," as Heaney puts it - just as expandable as imagination. And to think that the space providing the stretch of both imagination and time was the side yard of the church - now that, was something else.