Seamus Heaney: "Had I Not Been Awake"

Had I not been awake I would have missed it,
A wind that rose and whirled until the roof
Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore

And got me up, the whole of me a-patter,
Alive and ticking like an electric fence:
Had I not been awake I would have missed it,

It came and went so unexpectedly
And almost it seemed dangerously,
Returning like an animal to the house,

A courier blast that there and then
Lapsed ordinary. But not ever
After. And not now.

"Had I Not Been Awake" by Seamus Heaney, from Human Chain: Poems. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.  

Image credit: Untitled acrylic painting by Matthew Hamblen (originally color).