History says don't hope on this side of the grave
Thu Feb 14, 2008 at 04:26:07 PM PDT
History says, Don't hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime...
I'm 42.
As a teenager I suffered as Reagan and the contras bled the hope out of Nicaragua.
I ended up in Liberia. The night I became a father, my neighbor was assassinated and the country began a long descent into terror.
The US was too busy in the first Gulf war to help.
In El Salvador later I buried the recovered bones of the children killed (by US trained troops) at El Mozote.
Washington nearly boiled the hope out of me...
...but fuck it all
despite a thousand reasons
I'm in for a season of hard hope and hard work.
Will join me?
When the season turns we can be proud of what we did when we were young and foolish.
a poem...
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 or 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 the 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 ~
The Cure at Troy:
A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes
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