Human beings suffer

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 farther 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 that someone is hearing
the outcry and the birth-cry
of new life at its term.

Seamus Heaney, from his play, “The Cure at Troy”