This has always been one of my favourite poems.  From time to time a line will come into my head; it is very often this: ‘Useless to think you’ll park and capture it/ More thoroughly’.  This line visits me when I experience one of those ‘wow’ moments which has me reaching for my phone to take a picture.  It stops me in my tracks.  The moment I want to capture is fleeting – shall I waste it by fumbling with my phone?  Increasingly, I don’t; instead I allow myself to experience the moment through the lens which is my eye, a lens which, if I allow it, connects directly with my heart and soul.  Could you try this?  Next time you have one of those ‘gotta get a photo!’ moments, how about you don’t?  Instead you could stand still, allowing what is right in front of you to ‘catch the heart off guard and blow it open.’

Mrs Street, Teacher of English

Postscript
by Seamus Heaney

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.