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| "Seamus Heaney" by Burns Library, Boston College Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 |
Seamus Heaney is an Irish Nobel Laureate poet. He is one of President Biden's favorite Irish poets and one of mine as well. In honour of the inauguration today, here is a poem that President Biden is especially fond of.
THE CURE OF 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.
History says, Don’t hope
On the 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
And lightening 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.
by Seamus Heaney
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