Derek Mahon's 'Everything is going to be alright'

Some poems stick in the memory, sometimes the whole poem, sometimes a phrase or phrases and resurface at the appropriate time. In this case ‘The poems flow from the hand unbidden/And the hidden source is the watchful heart.’ and ‘There will be dying, there will be dying/but there is no need to go into that.’

Sometimes the world is just too ugly to deal with and you have to find a reason for getting out of bed to face the day.

This particular poem, taken from Mahon’s ‘Selected poems’ (1991) is almost an invocation or prayer for the morning, but a complex one I’m not going to simplify by attempting to summarise in prose. Though I think the final line is more wish than prediction.