And since the spirit needs to be fed, when we (I really mean, when I) spend too much time wrestling with pigs (who, as George Bernard Shaw famously observed, enjoy being in the mud), a poem for you all today: this is the poem that the Academy of American Poets circulated this morning in its poem-for-today email--Seamus Heaney, "Anything Can Happen":
Anything can happen. You know how JupiterWill mostly wait for clouds to gather head Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now He galloped his thunder cart and his horses
Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth And the clogged underearth, the River Styx, The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself. Anything can happen, the tallest towers
Be overturned, those in high places daunted, Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one, Setting it down bleeding on the next.
Ground gives. The heaven’s weight Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid. Capstones shift, nothing resettles right. Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.
