‘Take Care’: This beautiful poem by Michael D Higgins will make you feel better

While skillfully written prose can undoubtedly be beautiful, poems, both devastating and delightful, touch the soul in an entirely different way. Just a few artfully placed lines can have more power and pull than the greatest tale of fiction – if they are the right words. And these days, we need as much of these words. Words which will unite, uplift and soothe the soul during this uncertain times. President Michael D Higgins has composed a poem intended to do just this

“You won’t hear for a long time that the State is too big or that the State should be weakened. We are just seeing a great example of how the State is important for all of our citizens,” he said on Wednesday.

He told RTÉ Radio 1’s Drivetime programme: “It is a time for deepening and extending citizenship and putting it into practice. At the end of it, I think we might come out of it a much better people.

“We need now to seize what I call ‘the citizenship moment’ and that we would come out of this having rediscovered instincts of empathy and caring that we may have neglected in favour of more aggressive instincts of individualism of an extreme kind.”

 

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A post shared by President Michael D. Higgins (@presidentirl) on Mar 21, 2020 at 2:17pm PDT

He emphasised this in a new poem he composed and shared on Facebook, titled ‘Take Care.’

Take care of you and yours, he writes, and in the end, we’ll come home together.

Read it in full below:  

In the journey to the light,
the dark moments
should not threaten.
Belief
requires
that you hold steady.
Bend, if you will,
with the wind.
The tree is your teacher,
roots at once
more firm
from experience
in the soil
made fragile.