Anything can happen

An inspiring session today on some of the poetry of Seamus Heaney. Our wonderful teacher carried on way past the official finishing time and no one moved.

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Anything Can Happen

Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now
He galloped his thunder cart and his horses

Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth
And the clogged underearth, the River Styx,
The winding streams, the Atlantic shire itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest towers

Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak
Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest
off one,
Setting it down bleeding on the next.

Ground gives. The heaven’s weight
Lifts up Atlas like a kettle-lid.
Capstones shift, nothing resettles right,
Tellurium ash and fire-spores boil away.

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How this speaks to us now in our disorderly world, where unexpected things happen. Major things happen, minor things happen, minor things happen with major implications - “capstones lift, nothing resettles right.“