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 to unexpectedly
And almost it seemed dangerously,
Hurtling like an animal at the house,
.
A courier blast that there and then
Lapsed ordinary. But not ever
Afterwards. And not now.
The need or desire to Being awake to your own life is fundamental to us all. Yet sometimes ‘sleep’ in its many varied forms and manifestations may seem the easier and more natural option. We doze through our lives waking up to joy and tragedy perhaps, then returning to the slumber of the largely unexamined life. Yet here, after illness, Seamus Heaney begins his latest collection of poems with this acute recognition that is both an observation and a meditation.
” Had I not been awake I would have missed it..”
This reminds me of Mary Oliver’s wonderful final couplet in her poem (also on this blog) ‘ The Summer Day’ where she asks:
‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?’
Wake up and recognise our transience.
I love the luxurious power of ‘wild’…have we led ‘wild’ lives and if not, why not? Or is our wildness a secret, maybe a secret worth sharing, worth acknowledging especially to ourselves?
