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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.”
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.
Your gentle dew will come
and a stirring
of power
to go on
towards the space
of sharing.
In the misery of the I,
in rage,
it is easy to cry out
against all others
but to weaken
is to die
in the misery of knowing
the journey abandoned
towards the sharing
of all human hope
and cries
is the loss
of all we know
of the divine
reclaimed
for our shared
humanity.
Hold firm.
Take care.
Come home
together.