everything matters

I really like this Seamus Heaney poem (taken from the pictured 2010 collection), which he wrote while recovering from a significant stroke ...

... it's a beautiful evocation of why even the smallest observation can be important, and why everything matters:


'Had I not been awake'

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.

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Seamus Heaney (1939 – 2013)

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