"When The Wind And The Light Are Working Off Each Other"

For the past few days, autumn squalls have been quickly moving through from the west.  Puget Sound has alternated between bright-blue and white-capped and milky-grey and white-capped.  At times, yellow shafts of sunlight angle down through the ragged, travelling clouds.  I was reminded of the following poem by Seamus Heaney.

                              Postscript

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.

Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level (Faber and Faber 1996).

                                     Rockwell Kent, "Seascape" (c. 1933)