The Cure At Troy - Seamus Heaney

[Larry Robinson]

I have shared this poem by Seamus Heaney before but, given all that is going on in the world right now, it seems that we can all use some of this good medicine. He wrote this in Northern Ireland in the 1970s during “The Troubles,” a civil war whose end few others could imagine at the time.

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 further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
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.

	- Seamus Heaney’s  translation of
   "The Philoctetes," by Sophocles