Tippett: So I always begin my conversations, whoever I’m speaking with, whether they are a scientist or a theologian or a poet, by inquiring about the religious or spiritual background of someone’s childhood. It’s very incomplete and very imperfect, but we’re getting there. And compared with what Belfast was like ten years ago, the place is unrecognizable. Longley: My wife used to say that she hoped Northern Ireland would become like the rest of the world, and she now points out that the rest of the world is becoming as Northern Ireland used to be. And a piece of that is the importance of letting the voices of poets rise in the midst of tumult and be part of our way of finding our way back to the possibility of lived peace, and finding out what that can mean. So I believe that some of what you know here the rest of us need to know. And we’re at this moment where it feels like much of the rest of the world is drawing towards sectarianism. One thing I was really aware of as we were preparing to come here, and I was preparing to speak with you, is that this is a place that in recent memory has moved away from sectarianism, however humanly and fitfully that happens. He describes himself now as a “sentimental disbeliever.” He was born to English parents who moved to Belfast at the outbreak of World War II and raised him agnostic in the midst of Ireland’s religion-centric divides. Michael Longley has published over 20 books of poetry. Tippett: I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. For me, celebrating the wildflowers or the birds is like a kind of worship. Michael Longley: There’s a line by John Clare that I adore - I love John Clare I revere him - “Poets love nature and themselves are love.” And I believe that with all my heart.

And to this day, Michael Longley is a gentle, winsome force for us all, in the ongoing, never-finished work of social healing. That ended with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Like his late friend Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley was known in part as a poet of what is called “the Troubles” - the bloody, 30-year conflict between Protestants and Catholics, English and Irish. I had the pleasure of conversing with him before an adoring audience at the MAC Theatre in Belfast, in 2016. Krista Tippett, host: To dwell on beauty and normalcy, to reassert the liveliness of ordinary things, precisely in the face of what is hardest and most broken in society - this has been Michael Longley’s gift to Northern Ireland as one of its foremost living poets.

Mount and blade poems