There are those days when life is all too much: when work is taking over our lives, when it’s hard to get out of bed in the morning or when, as tired as you are, you still can’t sleep.

The poems I read in a book titled The Emergency Poet by Deborah Alma, reminded us to stop, even if it’s for only a moment, and put in perspective. Focus on the essential, best parts of life: of love, friends, and family; the simple of pleasure of being able to ‘sit out in the sun and listen.’

The beautiful poem ‘Postscript‘ written by Seamus Heaney reminds is that it is only when we take the time to stand in an in-between place, between the calm lake and the stormy sea, that we can have the space to welcome in change and all of its possibilities.

Here how it’s goes:

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

Bibliographic information

Title	Emergency Poet: An Anti-Stress Poetry Anthology
Author	Deborah Alma
Publisher	Michael O’Mara Books, Limited, 2015
ISBN	1782434054, 9781782434054
Length	192 pages