Poetry: Works like a Charm

Yesterday was UNESCO World Poetry Day. I missed it, which feels vaguely on brand for someone who believes poetry shows up precisely when you’re not looking for it.

This year, UNESCO focused on poetry’s quiet superpower: its ability to connect us. Across languages. Across borders. Across the kinds of differences that, these days, feel larger than they are. It’s also a reminder that not all languages are safe, and not all stories and songs  are written down. Some are carried – spoken, remembered, passed hand to hand before they disappear.

This makes poetry feel less like an art form and more like a form of keeping.

“Always be a poet, even in prose,”  Charles Baudelaire said. A lovely idea, especially for those of us mostly writing reminder lists and slightly passive-aggressive emails.

Audrey Azoulay once called poetry unmatched in its power, an intimate form of expression that opens doors between people. That feels right. Not because of structure or meter or rhythm or rhyme, but because poetry tends to arrive when nothing else does.

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My earliest recollection of it is not academic. It is in the living room of our house on the Dublin Road, listening as my da, recited Robert Service’s The Shooting of Dan McGrew or The Cremation of Sam McGee as though these were things all fathers carried around in their heads.  There was also William Wordsworth, which means that daffodils have never really been just  flowers. More, they are a kind of shorthand for that wee living room, that voice, and the moment poetry first made itself at home. 

It’s their time right now. Daffodils. A reminder again that something is always beginning again. 

Where my father learned about Wordsworth’s host of golden daffodils, I have no idea. Da is not a man of letters. He is a maker of things. A fixer. He grew up in Heaney country, in the Derry town-lands he criss-crossed on his motorbike in the early 1960s. His life was shaped by hard and necessary work doing the potato-digging, turf-cutting, roof-thatching – the craft that belongs as much to the land as to the hands that carry it out, though he’d say it was nothing more than what had to be done.

He whistled as he worked. Sang, too, always finding a tune on anything within reach. “The Black Velvet Band” on a hefty piano accordion with mother of pearl keys comes to mind.

And, my dad always sang in harmony to whatever was playing on the radio or whatever hymns the choir was singing on Sunday mornings at church. Maybe this is why it feels natural for me to first find the harmonies when I’m singing – not the melodies.

When he was just ten years old, recognizing his little brother’s musical talent, my father made a guitar for him. And, years later, before I was born, he bought me a violin that would one day open doors for me in far away places. But he never bought an instrument for himself, and I don’t recall him ever buying a book or borrowing one from the library. 

Still, poetry found him.

Perhaps this is why I have always maintained my father belongs in a Seamus Heaney poem. A man with the instinct of the thatcher and the sensitivity of the diviner, shaped by the same ground that shaped the language around him. I once watched him “witch” for water, the pull of it so strong that the hazel stick in his hands bent as though it had a will of its own—“suddenly broadcasting / Through a green hazel its secret stations.”

Daddy grew up in green spaces where people believed in cures and charms and healing wells. Where, when medicine failed, you went to the man who carried something older than science. My mother told me that when she had jaundice and the doctor had nothing to offer, my father went looking for the man with the charm.

He followed him into the fields and watched as herbs were gathered, crushed, mixed with stout, poured into a reused bottle. No instructions beyond “Drink it all.” No payment beyond belief.

While I have never quite believed in the charm, I have always believed in the faith behind it, which likely explains why on this – and every eve of St. Brigid’s Day –  I tied my scarf to a tree in my Mexican garden. Just in case I would need it later. Not because I believed, exactly. Though, perhaps, a little. 

In times of crisis, when what’s supposed to work doesn’t,  we reach for something else. Whatever that is, faith is part of it.

Miracle

After his stroke, Seamus Heaney wrote Miracle, drawing on the story of the paralytic lowered through the roof to be healed. But it is not the miracle itself that holds his attention; it is the men who carried him there. The ones without whom nothing happens – the human chain.

Miracle

Not the one who takes up his bed and walks
But the ones who have known him all along
And carry him in –

Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked
In their backs, the stretcher handles
Slippery with sweat. And no let up

Until he’s strapped on tight, made tiltable
And raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing.
Be mindful of them as they stand and wait

For the burn of the paid-out ropes to cool,
Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity
To pass, those ones who had known him all along.

This year’s theme for World Poetry Day feels like an extension of that idea. Poetry as the human chain. Carrying language, memory, identity. Across time, across borders, across the quiet distances between us …

Poet, Carol Ann Duffy once said we turn to poetry at the most intense moments of our lives. Love. Grief. Birth. Loss. Because it is the closest thing language has to prayer.

And Seamus Heaney reminded us that in turbulent times, poetry fortifies our inner life, because, in the end, we need more than economics to live. We need something like daffodils.  We need poetry. 

It works like a charm.