by Eavan Boland
Where the hills
are the colours of a child’s eyes,
where my children are distances, horizons.
At night,
on the edge of sleep,
I can see the shore of Dublin Bay,
its rocky sweep and its granite pier.
Is this, I say
how they must have seen it,
backing out on the mailboat at twilight,
shadows falling
on everything they had to leave?
And would love forever?
And then
I imagine myself
at the landward rail of that boat
searching for the last sight of a hand.
I see myself
on the underworld side of that water,
the darkness coming in fast, saying
all the names I know for a lost land.
Ireland. Absence. Daughter.
Mother Ireland
At first
I was land
I lay on my back to be fields
and when I turned
on my side
I was a hill
under freezing stars.
I did not see.
I was seen.
Night and day
words fell on me.
Seeds. Raindrops.
Chips of frost.
From one of them
I learned my name.
I rose up. I remembered it.
Now I could tell my story.
It was different
from the story told about me.
And now also
it was spring.
I could see the wound I had left
in the land by leaving it.
I travelled west.
Once there
I looked with so much love
at every field
as it unfolded
its rusted wheel and its pram chassis
and at the gorse-
bright distances
I had been
that they misunderstood me.
Come back to us
they said.
Trust me I whispered.
The Blossom
A May morning.
Light starting in the sky.
I have come here
after a long night.
Its senses of loss.
Its unrelenting memories of happiness.
The blossom on the apple tree is still in shadow,
its petals half-white and filled with water at the core,
in which the freshness and secrecy of dawn are stored
even in the dark.
How much longer
will I see girlhood in my daughter?
In other seasons
I knew every leaf on this tree.
Now I stand here
almost without seeing them
and so lost in grief
I hardly notice what is happening
as the light increases and the blossom speaks,
and turns to me
with blonde hair and my eyebrows and says –
imagine if I stayed here,
even for the sake of your love,
what would happen to the summer?
To the fruit?
Then holds out a dawn-soaked hand to me,
whose fingers I counted at birth
years ago.
And touches mine for the last time.
And falls to earth.
Tree of Life
A tree on a moonless night
has no sap or colour.
It has no flower and no fruit.
It waits for the sun to find them.
I cannot find you
in this dark hour
dear child.
Wait
for dawn to make us clear to one another.
Let the sun
inch above the roof-tops,
Let love
be the light that shows again
the blossom to the root.
Commissioned by the National Maternity Hospital, Dublin, during its 1994 Centenary, to mark a service to commemorate the babies who had died there.
The Necessity for Irony
On Sundays,
when the rain held off,
after lunch or later,
I would go with my twelve-year-old
daughter into town,
and put down the time
at junk sales, antique fairs.
There I would
lean over tables,
absorbed by
lace, wooden frames,
glass. My daughter stood
at the other end of the room,
her flame-coloured hair
obvious whenever –
which was not often –
I turned around.
I turned around.
She was gone.
Grown. No longer ready
to come with me, whenever
a dry Sunday
held out its promises
of small histories. Endings.
When I was young
I studied styles: their use
and origin. Which age
was known for which
ornament and was always drawn
to a lyric speech, a civil tone.
But never thought
I would have the need,
as I do now, for a darker one.
Spirit of irony,
my caustic author
of the past, of memory –
and of its pain, which returns
hurts, stings – reproach me now,
remind me
that I was in those rooms,
with my child,
with my back turned to her,
searching – oh irony! –
for beautiful things.
Heroic
Sex and history. And skin and bone.
And the oppression of Sunday afternoon.
Bells called the faithful to devotion.
I was still at school and on my own.
And walked and walked and sheltered from the rain.
The patriot was made of drenched stone.
His lips were still speaking. The gun
he held had just killed someone.
I looked up. And looked at him again.
He stared past me without recognition.
I moved my lips and wondered how the rain
would taste if my tongue were made of stone.
And wished it was. And whispered so that no one
could hear it but him. Make me a heroine.
Whose?
Beautiful land the patriot said
and rinsed it with his blood. And the sun rose.
And the river burned. The earth leaned
towards him. Shadows grew long. Ran red.
Beautiful land I whispered. But the roads
stayed put. Stars froze over the suburb.
Shadows iced up. Nothing moved.
Except my hand across the page. And these words.
from CODE
2001
I Marriage
I In Which Hester Bateman, Eighteenth-Century English Silversmith, Takes an Irish Commission
Hester Bateman made a marriage spoon
And then subjected it to violence.
Chased, beat it. Scarred it and marked it.
All in the spirit of our darkest century:
Far away from grapeshot and tar caps
And the hedge schools and the music of sedition
She is oblivious to she pours out
And lets cool the sweet colonial metal.
Here in miniature a man and woman
Emerge beside each other from the earth,
From the deep mine, from the seams of rock
Which made inevitable her craft of hurt.
They stand side by side on the handle.
She writes their names in the smooth
Mimicry of a lake the ladle is making, in
&
nbsp; A flowing script with a moon drowned in it.
Art and marriage: now a made match.
The silver bends and shines and in its own
Mineral curve an age-old tension
Inches towards the light. See how
Past and future and the space between
The semblance of empire, the promise of nation,
Are vanishing in this mediation
Between oppression and love’s remembrance
Until resistance is their only element. It is
What they embody, bound now and always.
History frowns on them, yet in its gaze
They join their injured hands and make their vows.
II Against Love Poetry
We were married in summer, thirty years ago. I have loved you deeply from that moment to this. I have loved other things as well. Among them the idea of women’s freedom. Why do I put these words side by side? Because I am a woman. Because marriage is not freedom. Therefore, every word here is written against love poetry. Love poetry can do no justice to this. Here, instead, is a remembered story from a faraway history: A great king lost a war and was paraded in chains through the city of his enemy. They taunted him. They brought his wife and children to him – he showed no emotion. They brought his former courtiers – he showed no emotion. They brought his old servant – only then did he break down and weep. I did not find my womanhood in the servitudes of custom. But I saw my humanity look back at me there. It is to mark the contradictions of a daily love that I have written this. Against love poetry.
III The Pinhole Camera
solar eclipse, August 1999
This is the day
and in preparation
you punch a hole
in a piece of card.
You hold it up against
a sheet of paper –
the simplest form
of a pinhole camera –
and put the sun
on your right shoulder:
A bright disc
appears on your page.
It loses half its diameter.
And more than half
in another minute.
You know
the reason for the red berries
darkening, and the road outside
darkening, but did you know
that the wedding
of light and gravity
is forever?
The sun is in eclipse:
if this were legend
the king of light would turn his face away.
A single shadow
would kill the salmon-rich
rivers and birdlife
and lilac of this island.
But this is real –
how your page records
the alignment of planets:
their governance.
In other words,
the not-to-be-seen-again
mystery of
a mutual influence:
The motorways
are flowing north.
The sycamores are a perfect green.
The wild jasmine
is a speaking white.
The sun is coming back. As
it will. As it must.
You track its progress.
I stand and watch.
For you and I
such science holds no secrets:
We are married thirty years,
woman and man.
Long enough
to know about power and nature.
Long enough
to know which is which.
IV Quarantine
In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking – they were both walking – north.
She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.
In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.
Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:
Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.
V Embers
One night in winter when a bitter frost
made the whin-paths crack underfoot,
a wretched woman, eyes staring, hair in disarray,
came to the place where the Fianna had pitched camp.
Your face is made of shadow. You are reading.
There is heat from the fire still. I am reading:
She asked every one of them in turn
to take her to his bed, to shelter her with his body.
Each one looked at her – she was old beyond her years.
Each one refused her, each spurned her, except Diarmuid.
When he woke in the morning she was young and beautiful.
And she was his, forever, but on one condition.
He could not say that she had once been old and haggard.
He could not say that she had ever … here I look up.
You are turned away. You have no interest in this.
I made this fire from the first peat of winter.
Look at me in the last, burnished light of it.
Tell me that you feel the warmth still.
Tell me you will never speak about the ashes.
VI Then
Where are the lives we lived
when we were young?
Our kisses, the heat of our skin, our bitter words?
The first waking to the first child’s cry?
VII First Year
It was our first home –
our damp, upstairs,
one-year eyrie –
above a tree-lined area
nearer the city.
My talkative, unsure,
unsettled self
was everywhere;
but you
were the clear spirit of somewhere.
At night
when we settled down
in the big bed by the window,
over the streetlight
and the first crackle of spring
eased the iron at
the base of the railings,
unpacking crocuses,
it was
the awkward corners of your snowy town
which filled
the rooms we made
and stayed there all year with
the burnt-orange lampshade,
the wasps in the attic.
Where is the soul of a marriage?
Because I am writing this
not to recall our lives,
but to imagine them,
I will say it is
in the first gifts of place:
the steep inclines
and country silences
of your boyhood,
the orange-faced narcissi
and the whole length of the Blackwater
strengthening our embrace.
VIII Once
The lovers in an Irish story never had good fortune.
They fled the king’s anger. They lay on the forest floor.
They kissed at the edge of death.
Did you know our suburb was a forest?
Our roof was a home for thrushes.
Our front door was a wild shadow of spruce.
Our faces edged in mountain freshness,
we took our milk in where t
he wide apart
prints of the wild and never-seen
creatures were set who have long since died out.
I do not want us to be immortal or unlucky.
To listen for our own death in the distance.
Take my hand. Stand by the window.
I want to show you what is hidden in
this ordinary, ageing human love is
there still and will be until
an inland coast so densely wooded
not even the ocean fog could enter it
appears in front of us and the chilled-
the-bone light clears and shows us
Irish wolves. A silvery man and wife.
Yellow-eyed. Edged in dateless moonlight.
They are mated for life. They are legendary. They are safe.
IX Thankëd be Fortune
Did we live a double life?
I would have said
we never envied
the epic glory of the star-crossed.
I would have said
we learned by heart
the code marriage makes of passion –
duty dailyness routine.
But after dark when we went to bed
under the bitter fire
of constellations,
orderly, uninterested and cold –
at least in our case –
in the bookshelves just above our heads,
all through the hours of darkness,
men and women
wept, cursed, kept and broke faith
and killed themselves for love.
Then it was dawn again.
Restored to ourselves,
we woke early and lay together