More word stealing today -- this time from Seamus Heaney, an Irish poet whose work I should know better. I found this poem ages ago at the beginning of Doubletake, a fantastic magazine on photography and writing. As it turns out, I was only reading a tiny fragment of the poem, which i just learned "is an adaptation of Sophocles' play, Philoctetes, written in the 5th century B.C. " Well, then.

I just reread it now after a little cut-paste, and though I'd planned on writing a bit about it have now decided I need to go down the street and buy the whole book immediately.

Is it timely now? Of course. But then, most remarkable things always are.


From "The Cure at Troy"

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.

History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.


word.