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From: "Jean R." <>
Subject: [Irish-in-UK] "A Chorus" - Derry's Seamus HEANEY (contemp.)
Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2008 11:57:14 -0700


SNIPPET: In 1995, an unassuming man from South Derry, a rural Catholic and
farmer's son, won the Nobel Prize for Literature almost 30 years after he
published his first book on poetry. Born in Mossbawn in 1939, Seamus HEANEY
joins other literary giants such as YEATS, BECKETT and SHAW. HEANEY has
described his work - "Poetry grows like a moss inside you and at certain
times you start picking it off. You can't sit down and do it just by willing
it." Following ceasefires, HEANEY wrote an article in a Scottish newspaper
in which he stated that cessation of violence is an opportunity to open a
space in the first level of each person's consciousness - a space where hope
can be developed and grow. Hope, he said, is a state of the soul rather than
a response to evidence. It is not the expectation that things will turn out
successfully but the conviction that something is worth working for, however
it turns out." HEANEY also has said, "When the ceasefires were announced,
there was an open if uncertain future ahead, just as there was a dark past
behind."

Today, the future of Ireland seems brighter than ever.

A 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
Or new life at its term.
It means, once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.


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