Swapping Poems with Friends
Living near the ocean continues to be the best possible medicine.
How about you? What's giving you grace, pleasure, far vistas, and examples of how to go on forever?
Tending a few flowers—many others have been eaten by The Woodchuck—remembering the pleasures of fiction—I recently finished Call Me by Your Name, by André Aciman, which I loved—and taking deeper interest in the food I cook, has enriched my days and reminds me that my wants are few and always simple. Thank goodness for that. Who said that a writer can get by on a little bit of rice? It's true.
My dear friend Brit and I, often exchange poems—our own and others'—which sustains me, as well. I wanted to share what she sent me yesterday morning, from Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney's final book, Human Chain, published in 2010. I used to live very close to his home in Ireland, and although I looked for him every time I walked along Sandymount Strand, I never saw him out and about. Heaney died in 2013 and I feel ever grateful for the books he left us. He did important work, including as someone who wrote through a difficult time in Irish history.
A Poem for You
Had I Not Been Awake
by Seamus Heaney
Had I not been awake I would have missed it,
A wind that rose and whirled until the roof
Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore
And got me up, the whole of me a-patter,
Alive and ticking like an electric fence:
Had I not been awake I would have missed it,
It came and went so unexpectedly
And almost it seemed dangerously,
Returning like an animal to the house,
A courier blast that there and then
Lapsed ordinary. But not ever
After. And not now.
from Human Chain. Faber and Faber, 2010.
My friend, the novelist and short fiction writer, Brad Watson died suddenly a couple years ago, and he also left us an important body of work. I wanted more, though, and it makes my heart ache because I know he was working on something that, had he had more time, might have been his fifth book. If you need an excellent novel this summer, get yourself a copy of Miss Jane, which I found brilliant and moving and hard to shake, even three years after reading it. Let it open your heart in this time when I honestly think that is what we all need, more than anything: bigger hearts, more empathy, greater care for others.
—Holly Wren Spaulding, June, 2023