Climate Change

Temperatures have been in the single digits for days now, but here in Heath, and I think all over the country, we are feeling a change in the climate as our new president takes office. Never has the phrase Global Warming been so positive as we warm to each other, warm to the tasks at hand.

We were all feeling the warmth of good fellowship and optimism last night at the Inaugural pot luck at the Community Hall, to eat and drink and celebrate together, and watch the Inaugural Ceremony that had been taped earlier in the day.

There was a lot of talk about what next, but just for today we celebrated. The pot luck committee chose a section of the Seamus Heaney poem The Cure at Troy to read aloud because it captured the mood of the day.

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 a new life at its term.

Love is Sweeping the Country