Human Chain
Seeing the bags of meal passed hand to hand
In close-up by the aid workers, and soldiers
Firing over the mob, I was braced again
With a grip on two sack corners,
Two packed wads of grain I’d worked to lugs
To give me purchase, ready for the heave—
The eye-to-eye, one-two, one-two upswing
on to the trailer, then to stoop and drag and drain
of the next lift. Nothing surpassed
That quick unburdening, backbreaks’s truest payback,
A letting go which will not come again
Or it will, once, And for all.
by Seamus Heaney
from Human Chain
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY 2010
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