My gratitude today is National Poetry Month. For
the past 11 Aprils, I’ve stepped away from whatever was going on in my life—although
not from what was going on in the world—to explore poetry as a means of
understanding, well, everything and anything.
Poetry helped me deal with four years of the kleptocracy
that was the last presidential administration. It gave me hope during the first
year of the pandemic. It presented a framework for the Russian invasion of
Ukraine. This year, it reminded me there’s more to life than a job hunt.
And National Poetry Month introduced me to new
poets, just as it strengthened my bonds with old friends.
All of this is cause for deep gratitude.
Today’s entry for National Poetry Month comes
from Seámus Heaney. Eight years ago I gave you his heartbreaking “Requiem
for the Croppies”, and mentioned his linguistic mastery, which included
lyrical translations from Irish, Latin and Greek. For this round, I’ve chosen
“The Cure at Troy”, which is Heaney’s take on Sophocles’ Philoctetes.
All you need to know about Philoctetes is that
he was one of the approximately 72 squillion suitors for Helen, and thus
honor-bound to help Menelaus retrieve her from Troy. He was stranded on the
island of Lemnos on the way (different versions give different reasons, but all
seem to involve some kind of suppurating wound whose putrescence offended the
Greeks). After many years of siege, the Greeks were told they wouldn’t win the
war until they possessed the weapons of Heracles, which were…on Lemnos. As you might
imagine, Philoctetes (reduced to a solitary animal-like existence in the
intervening time) wasn’t exactly overjoyed at the prospect of handing over the
sacred weapons to the very men who’d abandoned him (he was particularly pissed
off at Odysseus), but Heracles appeared and told him to give up the artifacts
and his wound would be healed by Asclepius, and he would become a great hero, a
key driver of winning the war. (Some versions have him killing Paris, the
little toerag who started the whole thing; others put him in the actual Trojan
Horse. Either way he was instrumental in driving a stake through it.)
So there are a lot of symbolic moving parts to
this one—the festering wound that won’t heal and leads to the debasement of a
warrior; only by a series of redemptive decisions is he given a permanent cure,
which leads to the end of a long, exhausting war.
Heaney wrote his version in 1990 as a tribute
to Nelson Mandela, and an indictment of apartheid. (Its relevance to the
situation in Northern Ireland is also obvious.) Note that—like Mandela—Heaney
urges the reader to move beyond revenge, to the “further shore” with “cures and
healing wells.” But he also speaks of the "longed-for tidal wave of justice" that is building. I believe these are thoughts we should keep before us in these
times.
“The Cure at 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.
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 further 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 someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
©2024 Bas Bleu
