Three Hearts Beat in Time
This song started life as a villanelle written by poet Eamon Grennan on the birth of his youngest daughter. His brother Tom, who was in my class in secondary school in Roscrea, challenged me to make it into a song and this is the result.
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Eamon Grennan
Born in Dublin, Eamon Grennan attended boarding school at a Cistercian monastery. He met Derek Mahon and Eavan Boland as an undergraduate at University College, Dublin, spent a year in Rome, and then came to the United States to earn his PhD at Harvard. He began writing poetry in earnest in 1977 and published his first collection,Wildly for Days, in 1983. He lives in the United States but returns frequently to western Ireland, and his poetry shows the imprint of both lands. Of his fitting resident alien status, Grennan notes, “I live at a sort of distance, an angle to the place I live in. |
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Three Hearts Beat in Time
I hold the baby whose eyes are meeting mine In the delivery room it’s almost dawn Beyond this window the grey bridge starts to shine By her first light while three hearts beat in time. We heard her first blind cries an hour ago And then we knew her solitude. She cracks a wondrous pink yawn But holds her peace while three hearts beat in time Three hearts beat in time That won’t whatever happens Quit this winding river run From source to sea I hold the baby Whose eyes are meeting mine? I am still as stone And feel relieved |
Worn down still bleeding you lie And watch us meeting one another What we two saw in the world adds up So three hearts beat in time Three hearts beat in time Now three hearts beat in time That won’t whatever happens Quit this winding river run From source to sea I hold the baby Whose eyes are meeting mine I am still as stone And feel relieved Love just look at what we’ve done I hold the baby whose eyes are meeting mine The world adds up to three hearts beating time The world adds up to three hearts beating time Repeat last verse |