Happy birthday to Seamus Heaney, an all time favorite, who does that thing I love in poems, where he begins in ordinariness — like in this poem about a fucking badger — & then slips in a question that stuns you:

“How perilous is it to choose / not to love the life we’re shown?”

He does it here, too, at the end of “Whatever You Say Say Nothing” — a poem of protest & political questioning — when he sets the image & draws it out, & then...”Is there a life before death?” The question becomes an invitation to both prayer & hopelessness at once.

& here — from “Funeral Rites” — a poem about the unceasing murders of Irishmen, he makes double use of the word “pine” — both the pine box of the coffin & the longing for what once was normalcy.

& lastly — a favorite of mine. How this poem begins again with the ordinary looking, & then, that perfect description of youth — “We were small and thought we knew nothing / worth knowing” — & how the whole poem then turns on the hinge of those lines toward wonder.