In Chicago: Anything Can Happen

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I'm looking forward to the premiere Tuesday night of a new choral work by Mohammed Fairouz. It's based in part on "Anything Can Happen," a translation that Seamus Heaney made of an Ode by Horace.


Here's the text:

Anything Can Happen
by Seamus Heaney (After Horace, Odes, I, 34)*

Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well just now
He galloped his thunder cart and his horses

Across a clear blue sky.. It shook the earth
and the clogged underearth, the River Styx,
the winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest towers

Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,
Setting it down bleading on the next.

Ground gives. The heaven's weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle lid.
Capstones shift. Nothing resettles right.
Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.

A lot of people think the modern translation sounds like it's about 9/11.

But maybe it's about revolution?

Or love?

Or all of the above?

What do you think?

* poem retrieved from . . . With Both Hands blog. "Anything Can Happen" was published in book form by Amnesty International in 2004.

Image: Lightning storm generated by Chilean volcano at Universe Today website.