Had I not been awake I would have missed it

Running rest-day ...

... here's another Seamus Heaney poem, again from his final 2010 Human Chain volume, which is pictured here against a wonderful appreciation - of Heaney - by Blake Morrison:


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.