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.

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
 

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​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 vers