This poem is one of my favorite descriptions of compassionate love. I did this drawing in response to it. This poem continues to speak to me today, to those moments when I find myself in situations where I think I just do not have anything more in me to give. Where do you get the strength to love when you seem to have nothing left in the tank?
“St Kevin and the Blackbird”, by Seamus Heaney,
St Kevin and the blackbird.
The saint is kneeling,
arms stretched out,
inside his cell, but the cell is narrow, soOne turned-up palm is out the window, stiff As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands and Lays in it and settles down to nest.
Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,
Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.
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And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow, Imagine being Kevin. Which is he? Self-forgetful or in agony all the time
From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms? Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth
Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head? Alone and mirrored clear in Love’s deep river,
‘To labour and not to seek reward,’ he prays,
A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.
