One of my dear friends has a custom of sending handwritten postcards, and each one arrives as an unexpected delight. There’s something so tangible and personal about handwriting, and increasingly rare in our digitized world.

This week I visited an exhibit of Seamus Heaney’s work, full of texts so familiar they feel like my hometown. And yet, seeing such well-known words in his own hand brought a spark of tears to my eyes. There’s a directness to ink on paper that collapses time and space, and opens up some more essential connection.

Dear ones, we are not all poets, or artists, or even correspondents. Sometimes all we can offer is a quick text or a glance across the table.

But however we can, let’s say the things that keep us just a little softer.

Let’s keep the further shore in sight.

Excerpt from The Cure at Troy,  

         by Seamus Heaney

Human beings suffer

They torture one another,

They get hurt and get hard.

No poem or play or song

Can fully right a wrong

Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols

Beat on their bars together.

A hunger-striker’s father

Stands in the graveyard dumb.

The police widow in veils

Faints at the funeral home.

History says, Don’t hope

On this side of the grave…

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change

On the far side of revenge.

Believe that a further shore

Is reachable from here.

Believe in miracles

And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:

The utter, self-revealing

Double-take of feeling.

If there’s fire on the mountain

Or lightning and storm

And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing

The outcry and the birth-cry

Of new life at its term.

It means once in a lifetime

That justice can rise up

And hope and history rhyme.