NICOLA Sturgeon has urged people to listen to Joe Biden read out a poem by Seamus Heaney about conflict and reconciliation.

The First Minister tweeted a link to a RTE news broadcast which showed the US President elect reading out the Irish poet's The Cure of Troy in his campaign video. 

Here are the words from The Cure of Troy which Biden quoted:

Human beings suffer.
They torture one another.
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
History says, Don’t hope
On the side of the grave,’
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles.
And cures and healing wells.
Call miracle self-healing,
The utter self revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
And lightening and storm
And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

Nicola Sturgeon tweeted a link to RTE news which showed a campaign video by Biden accompanied by him reading the Heaney poem.

She tweeted: "Take a moment to listen to this..."

Heaney’s poem is a translation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, and Biden used it in a campaign video and turned to it during his Democratic party nomination acceptance speech in August.

Former US President Bill Clinton quoted part of the poem in his remarks to people in Derry in 1995 during the Northern Ireland Peace Process.

The poem speaks to the Troubles in Northern Ireland – where Heaney was born and grew up.

But at the time of its composition, the poet - who won the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature - also saw its themes echoing the contemporary political situation in South Africa, as the apartheid regime fell and Nelson Mandela was released from prison. 

Sophocles’ play, first performed in 409BC, is about how a bitter division was overcome between the archer Philoctetes, left on Crete with a festering wound – a snake bite – and Odysseus, who needed his help in the Trojan War. 

The Greek playwright's words and Heaney's interpretation of them resonate today in the US context amid the country's deep divisions over race, inequality and Republican versus Democrat. During his campaign and since winning the election Biden has sought to give citizens a message of hope that underlined these wounds can be healed and unity and calm can be restored.