Seamus Heaney: Chorus from The Cure at Troy

                                                CHORUS

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.

Chorus from The Cure at Troy by Seamus Heaney. Text as published in The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991 reprint edition).

Art credit: "Beautiful Mountain Lightning Kyukw," wallpaper by unknown photographer.
 

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.



"Postscript" by Seamus Heaney. Text as published in The Spirit Level: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996).

My thanks to subscriber Monique Metzemaekers for suggesting this poem.

Art credit: "Postscript," text performed by Seamus Heaney, video by Cian Vaughan on Vimeo.

Seamus Heaney: "Had I Not Been Awake"

Had I not been awake I would have missed it,
A wind that rose and whirled until the roof
Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore

And got me up, the whole of me a-patter,
Alive and ticking like an electric fence:
Had I not been awake I would have missed it,

It came and went so unexpectedly
And almost it seemed dangerously,
Returning like an animal to the house,

A courier blast that there and then
Lapsed ordinary. But not ever
After. And not now.

"Had I Not Been Awake" by Seamus Heaney, from Human Chain: Poems. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.  

Image credit: Untitled acrylic painting by Matthew Hamblen (originally color).