by Eavan Boland
They called them letters to the dead.
III
They did not mourn or grieve these signs or marks.
They were intimate, imploring, local, desperate.
IV
Here at the threshold of an Irish spring
you can no longer see,
hawthorn bushes with their small ivory flowers
will soon come alive in every wind. Soon,
every hillside will be a distant bride.
V
If I could write it differently,
the secret history of a place,
as if it were a story of hidden water, known only
through the strange acoustic of a stream underfoot
in shallow grass
it would be this –
this story.
VI
I wanted to bring you the gifts of the island,
the hawthorn in the last week of April,
the sight of the Liffey above Leixlip.
The willows there could be girls,
their hair still wet after a swim.
Instead, I have brought you a question.
VII
How many daughters stood alone at a grave,
and thought this of their mothers’ lives?
That they were young in a country that hated a woman’s body.
That they grew old in a country that hated a woman’s body.
VIII
They asked for the counsel of the dead.
They asked for the power of the dead.
These are my letters to the dead.
To Memory
This is for you, goddess that you are.
This is a record for us both, this is a chronicle.
There should be more of them, they should be lyrical
and factual, and true, they should be written down
and spoken out on rainy afternoons, instead of which
they fall away; so I have written this, so it will not.
My last childless winter was the same
as all the other ones. Outside my window
the motherless landscape hoarded its own kind.
Light fattened the shadows; frost harried the snowdrops.
There was a logic to it, the way my mother loved astrology –
she came from a valley in the country
where everything that was haphazard and ill-timed
about our history had happened and so it seemed natural
that what she wanted most were the arts of the pre-determined.
My child was born at the end of winter. How to prove it?
Not the child, of course, who slept in pre-spring darkness,
but the fact that the ocean – moonless, stripped of current –
entered the room quietly one evening and
lay down in the weave of the rug, and could be seen
shifting and sighing in blue-green sisal and I said
nothing about it, then or later, to anyone and when
the spring arrived I was ready to see a single field in
the distance on the Dublin hills allow its heathery colour
to detach itself and come upstairs and settle in
the corner of the room furthest from the window.
I could, of course, continue. I could list for you
a whole inventory of elements and fixed entities
that broke away and found themselves disordered in
that season – assembling, dispersing – and without
a thought for laws that until then had barred
an apple flower from opening out at midnight
or lilac rooting in the coldest part of ocean. Then
it stopped. Little by little what was there came back.
Slowly at first; then surely. I realised what had happened
was secret, hardly possible, to be remembered always,
which is why you are listening as rain comes down,
restored to its logic, responsive to air and land
and I am telling you this: you are after all
not simply the goddess of memory, you have
nine daughters yourself and can understand.
Becoming the Hand of John Speed
Atlantis – A Lost Sonnet
How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder
that a whole city – arches, pillars, colonnades,
not to mention vehicles and animals – had all
one fine day gone under?
I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.
Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city –
white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting
under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe
what really happened is
this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word
to convey that what is gone is gone forever and
never found it. And so, in the best traditions of
where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it.
Becoming the Hand of John Speed
How do you make a nation?
How do you make it answer to you?
How do you make its parts, its waterways
its wished-for blueness at the horizon point
take heed?
I have no answer. I was born in a nation
I had no part in making.
But sometimes late at night when I want to imagine
what it was to be a part of it
I take down my book and then I am
the agile mapping hand of John Speed
making The Kingdome of Ireland, 1612,
my pen moving over a swerve of contour,
my ink stroke adding an acre of ocean.
The Dublin hills surrender two dimensions.
Forests collapse, flattening all their wolves.
The Irish sea
cedes its ancient tensions,
its gannets, gulls, cormorants all stopped
from flying away by their own silhouettes –
and you might say my nation has become
all but unrecognisable, but no,
I remember the way it was when I was young,
wanting the place to know me at first glance
and it never did,
it never did, and so
this is the way to have it, cut to size,
its waters burned in copper, its air unbreathed
its future neighbourhoods almost all unnamed –
and even the old, ocean-shaped horizon
surprised by its misshapen accuracy –
ready and flat and yearning to be claimed.
Violence Against Women
Once in the West Pennines I was shown
the source of the Industrial Revolution –
the first streams harnessed to the wheels
which drove the mills which spun out textiles
which emptied out the cottages and hillsides
and sent men and women down to Hades.
(Fast water and mountains without lime
and greed all complicit in the shame.)
Real men and women, flesh and blood
and long dead and ready to be understood –
and not those abandoned and unsaved
women who died here who never lived:
Mindless, sexless, birthless, only sunned
by shadows, only dressed in muslin,
shepherdesses of the English pastoral
waiting for the return of an English April
that never came and never will again.
Wheels turned, the jenny worked, a plainspoken
poetry was chanted by the flow
and finished them. They were the last to know
what happened in this north-facing twilight,
the aftermath I saw here, staring at
an old site of injury, a hurt
that never healed and never can. O art,
O empire and the arrang
ed relations,
so often covert, between power and cadence –
tell me what it is you have done with
the satin bonnets and the pastel sun, with
the women gathering their unreal sheep
into real verse for whom no one will weep.
Instructions
To write about age you need to take something and
break it.
(This is an art that has always loved young women.
And silent ones.)
A branch, perhaps, girlish with blossom. Snapped off.
Close to the sap.
Then cut through a promised summer. Continue. Cut
down to the root.
The spring afternoon will come to your door, angry
as any mother. Ignore her.
Now take syntax. Break that too. What is left is for you
and you only:
A dead tree. The future. What does not bear fruit. Or
thinking of.
In Coming Days
Soon
I will be as old as the Shan Van Vocht –
(although no one knows how old she is.)
Soon
I will ask to meet her on the borders of Kildare.
It will be cold.
The hazel willow will be frozen by the wayside.
The rag-taggle of our history
will march by us.
They will hardly notice two women by the roadside.
I will speak to her. Even though I know
she can only speak with words made by others.
I will say to her: You were betrayed.
Do you know that?
She will look past me at the torn banners,
makeshift pikes, bruised feet. Her lips will move:
To the Currach of Kildare
The boys they will repair.
There is still time, I will tell her. We can still
grow old together.
And will Ireland then be free?
And will Ireland then be free?
We loved the same things, I will say –
or at least some of them. Once in fact, long ago -
Yes! Ireland shall be free,
From the centre to the sea -
I almost loved you.
NEW POEMS
Art of Empire
If no one in my family ever spoke of it,
if no one handed down
what it was to be born to power
and married in a poor country.
If no one wanted to remember
the noise of the redcoats cantering
in lanes bleached with apple flowers
on an April morning.
If no one ever mentioned how a woman was,
what she did,
what she never did again,
when she lived in a dying Empire.
If what was not said was never seen
If what was never seen could not be known
think of this as the only way
an empire could recede –
taking its laws, its horses and its lordly all,
leaving a single art to be learned,
and one that required
neither a silversmith nor a glassblower
but a woman skilled in the sort of silence
that lets her stitch shadow flowers
into linen with pastel silks
who never looks up
to remark on or remember why it is
the bird in her blackwork is warning her:
not a word not a word
not a word not a word.
The Long Evenings of their Leavetakings
My mother was married by the water.
She wore a grey coat and a winter rose.
She said her vows beside a cold seam of the Irish coast.
She said her vows near the shore where
the emigrants set down their consonantal n:
on afternoon, on the end of everything, at the start of ever.
Yellow vestments took in light
a chalice hid underneath its veil.
Her hands were full of calla and cold weather lilies.
The mail packet dropped anchor.
A black headed gull swerved across the harbour.
Icy promises rose beside a cross-hatch of ocean and horizon.
I am waiting for the words of the service. I am waiting for
keep thee only and all my earthly.
All I hear is an afternoon’s worth of never.
Re-reading Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village’ in a Changed Ireland
1
Well not for years – at least not then or then.
I never looked at it. Never took it down.
The place was changing. That much was plain:
Land was sold. The little river was paved over with stone.
Lilac ran wild.
Our neighbours opposite put out the For Sale sign.
2
All the while, I let Goldsmith’s old lament remain
Where it was: high on my shelves, stacked there at the back –
Dust collecting on its out-of-date,
other-century, superannuated pain.
3
I come from an old country.
Someone said it was past its best. It had missed its time.
But it was beautiful. Blue suggested it, and green defined it.
Everywhere I looked it provided mirrors, mirror flashes, sounds.
Its name was not Ireland. It was Rhyme.
4
I return there for a moment as the days
Wind back, staying long enough to hear vowels rise
Around the name of a place.
Goldsmith’s origin but not his source.
Lissoy. Signal and sibilance of a river-hamlet with trees.
5
And stay another moment to summon his face,
To see his pen work the surface,
To watch lampblack inks laying phrase after phrase
On the island, the village he is taking every possible care to erase.
6
And then I leave.
7
Here in our village of Dundrum
The Manor Laundry was once the Corn Mill.
The laundry was shut and became a bowling alley.
The main street held the Petty Sessions and Dispensary.
8
A spring morning.
A first gleam of sunshine in Mulvey’s builder’s yard.
The husbands and wives in the walled graveyard
Who brought peace to one another’s bodies are not separated.
But wait. Mulvey’s hardware closed down years ago.
The cemetery can’t be seen from the road.
9
Now visitors come from the new Town Centre,
Built on the site of an old mill,
Their arms weighed down with brand names, fashion labels, bags.
10
Hard to know which variant
Of our country this is. Hard to say
Which variant of sound to use at the end of this line.
11
We were strangers here once. Now
Someone else
Is living out their first springtime under these hills.
Someone else
Feels the sudden ease that comes when the wind veers
South and warms rain.
Would any of it come back to us if we gave it another name?
(Sweet Auburn loveliest village of the Plain.)
12
In a spring dusk I walk to the Town Centre,
I stand listening to a small river,
Closed in and weeping.
Everyone leaving in the dusk with a single bag,
The way souls are said to enter the underworld
With one belonging.
And no one remembering.
13
A subject people knows this.
The first loss is through history.
The final one is through language.
14
It is time to go back to where I came from.
15
I take down the book. Centuries and years
Fall softly from the page. Sycamores, monasteries, a schoolhouse
And river-loving trees, their leaves casting iron-coloured shadows,
Are falling and falling
As the small town of Lissoy
Sinks deeper into sweet Augustan double talk and disappears.
As
A squeak of light. Ocean air looking
to come inland, to test its influence on
the salty farms waking.
Mist lifts. The distance
reappears. In an hour or so
someone will say crystal clear
even though there is