Gone fishing

And... breathe.

When R and I went off to Stratford this afternoon to take a walk along the river, and then sit in the sun in the Bancroft Gardens, drinking coffee and eating cake, the US Presidential election Electoral College projection stood exactly where it's been since Wednesday. About an hour after we got home another batch of votes was declared in Pennsylvania, at which point CNN called the race for Biden and Harris, and I promptly burst into tears.

This evening the Irish media channel RTE played a recording of Joe Biden reading Seamus Heaney, and I wound up in tears again...

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.

from The Cure at Troy
Seamus Heaney