A Hopeful Poem

A favorite Anthropology professor of mine often says that Anthropology is good news for people who like bad news because Anthropologists concern themselves with topics such as conflict, oppression and human suffering. These are important areas in need of study, but they are also, by definition, topics which can seem desperate and full of despair. When we, his students, are discouraged and ask if there is any point to hoping that the world might get better, this professor turns our attention to poetry. In particular, he shared an excerpt from The Cure at Troy by Seamus Heaney which I would like to share with you:

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 a fire on the mountain
Or 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...

As I prepare to spend a year in an area of the world that is filled with conflict, I cling to the belief that a further shore is reachable from here.