In his poem “Postscript” (The Spirit Level, 1996), Seamus Heaney describes a flock of swans, and how the sight of them—underwater, in flight—has a powerful and timeless quality. (You are neither here nor there / a hurry through which known and strange things pass.)

Those women in service were also a flock. Also underwater. Also neither here nor there.

And yet.

‍To catch the heart off-guard, Heaney wrote, and blow it open.

One imagines that rare in-between moment, when the spirit soared and the mind raced, perhaps a different future beckoned.