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?

Witness

Mountain Peak  (Bae Caernarfon,Wales. May 2014. M.A. Reilly).

Witness

 - Denise Levertov

Sometimes the mountain
is hidden from me in veils
of cloud, sometimes
I am hidden from the mountain
in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,
when I forget or refuse to go
down to the shore or a few yards
up the road, on a clear day,
to reconfirm
that witnessing presence.



from Denise Levertov: Selected Poems, by Denise Levertov -