#PoetryBreak: The Lost Land

Today's #PoetryBreak is from Eavan Boland. Happy St. Patrick's Day.

Bay (M.A. Reilly, Ireland)

The Lost Land

BY EAVAN BOLAND

I have two daughters.

They are all I ever wanted from the earth.

Or almost all.

I also wanted one piece of ground:

One city trapped by hills. One urban river.

An island in its element.

So I could say mine. My own.

And mean it.

Now they are grown up and far away

and memory itself

has become an emigrant,

wandering in a place

where love dissembles itself as landscape:

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.

“The Lost Land” from THE LOST LAND by Eavan Boland. Copyright ©1998 by Eavan Boland. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Source: The Lost Land (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1998)

Poetry Break: Witness

Grafton Street (M.A. Reilly, Dublin. 2008)

This poem is one of five selected from Eavan Boland's new collection A Poet's Dublin, with photographs by the author.

Here is the city –
its worn-down mountains,
its grass and iron,
its smoky coast
seen from the high roads
on the Wicklow side.

From Dalkey Island
to the North Wall,
to the blue distance seizing its perimeter,
its old divisions are deep within it.

And in me also.
And always will be:
Out of my mouth they come.
The spurred and booted garrisons.
The men and women
they dispossessed.

What is a colony
if not the brutal truth
that when we speak
the graves open.
And the dead walk?

The Emigrant Irish

On Grafton Street (M.A. Reilly. Dublin, 2008)

The Emigrant Irish

by Eavan Boland

Like oil lamps, we put them out the back —

of our houses, of our minds. We had lights
better than, newer than and then

a time came, this time and now
we need them. Their dread, makeshift example:

they would have thrived on our necessities.
What they survived we could not even live.
By their lights now it is time to
imagine how they stood there, what they stood with,
that their possessions may become our power:
Cardboard. Iron. Their hardships parceled in them.
Patience. Fortitude. Long-suffering
in the bruise-colored dusk of the New World.

And all the old songs. And nothing to lose.

Eavan Boland, "The Emigrant Irish," from Outside History: Selected Poems 1980-1990. Copyright © 1987 by Eavan Boland. Used by permission of W.W.Norton & Company, Inc.

"My mother died one summer—/the wettest in the records of the state."

Moon Longing (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

And SoulBy Eavan Boland

My mother died one summer—

the wettest in the records of the state.

Crops rotted in the west.

Checked tablecloths dissolved in back gardens.

Empty deck chairs collected rain.

As I took my way to her

through traffic, through lilacs dripping blackly

behind houses

and on curbsides, to pay her

the last tribute of a daughter, I thought of something

I remembered

I heard once, that the body is, or is

said to be, almost all

water and as I turned southward, that ours is

a city of it,

one in which

every single day the elements begin

a journey towards each other that will never,

given our weather,

fail—

       the ocean visible in the edges cut by it,

cloud color reaching into air,

the Liffey storing one and summoning the other,

salt greeting the lack of it at the North Wall and,

as if that wasn't enough, all of it

ending up almost every evening

inside our speech—

coast canal ocean river stream and now

mother and I drove on and although

the mind is unreliable in grief, at

the next cloudburst it almost seemed

they could be shades of each other,

the way the body is

of every one of them and now

they were on the move again—fog into mist,

mist into sea spray and both into the oily glaze

that lay on the railings of

the house she was dying in

as I went inside.

“And Soul” from DOMESTIC VIOLENCE by Eavan Boland. Copyright ©2007 by Eavan Boland. 

Drawing Your Way Into and Out of a Poem

Eavan Boland reading.

This is an sample of some work I will be doing with administrators and teachers later in the week focusing on comprehension and poetry.  The poem, This Moment, is authored by Irish poet Eavan Boland.