Title: Where Hope and History rhyme
Headings: Where Hope and History rhyme
Where Hope and History rhyme
Poems do not rectify a wrong, what they do often is to teach us that what we are seeing is wrong
Creating the Context
Reachable Shore
Museum of Conscience

Content: Is it because poetry – and literature in general – offers a language that sounds good? Or is it that it offers us visions, dreams and worlds that drive the collective imagination to imagine a different reality? The jury is still out on this, is it? No. The Cincinnati National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, which describes itself as a ‘museum of conscience’, on the banks of the Ohio River, separated the slave-owning States of the South from the anti-slavery States of the North. The Underground Railroad was a system of routes, safe-houses and messengers that was instrumental in taking many slaves from the South into the North, Mexico and Canada in the 19th century. Hanging from this museum’s roof, about halfway down for all visitors to see and read, was a banner with some lines of poetry. The lines were from the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney’s ‘The Cure at Troy’. Heaney, quite used to fascism, violence and the quest for independence, hailing as he does from Ireland, had more to say in this poem, as I discovered later: No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.