Wordless Wednesday: The first dahlia of summer
Poetry Sunday: Excerpt from The Cure at Troy by Seamus Heaney
In his speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president last Thursday, Vice-President Biden quoted from a work by the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney. I was not familiar with the poem and so I had to look it up. It is from a work entitled The Cure at Troy which was an adaptation by Heaney, written in verse, of Sophocles' play, Philoctetes . Philoctetes was a Greek master archer who was abandoned on a desert island by his fellow soldiers and countrymen and was later asked by the Greeks to return to fight in the Trojan War. The work was published in 1991 and in writing it, Heaney evidently was thinking of "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland. It seems to fit equally well our own troubles of today. It is a poem for all times. Verses from The Cure at Troy by Seamus Heaney 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.
Simply beautiful! :-)
ReplyDeleteIt's one of those nice surprises the garden sometimes offers. I planted these dahlia tubers last year and didn't dig them at the end of the season. Usually, they don't survive to come back the next year, but these did and now they brighten my day.
DeleteThat is an especially beautiful one. Now that my sister has me out of her hair, I imagine she is getting her tubers out of the basement and planting them again. How fortunate that this one wintered over.
ReplyDeleteI was completely surprised to see those plants coming up, especially since we had one of our colder winters of recent years. Sometimes there is just no accounting for Nature!
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