Sinister: pause, and feel, and hark

[Emily Wilska]

Sinister,

I'm too numb and stupid with grief to be able to put my thoughts into
intelligible words, but I want to share with you all what is, for me, a
means of getting through all this.  So much has changed, but all is
never lost.

Keep living,
Emily


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 wails.

 
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.
It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

--Seamus Heaney, from The Cure at Troy
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