by Eavan Boland
so that autumn
which was once
the hard look of stars,
the frown on a gardener’s face,
a gradual bronzing of the distance,
will be,
from now on,
a crisp tinder underfoot. Cheekbones. Eyes. Will be
a mouth crying out. Let me.
Let me die.
from THE LOST LAND
1998
I Colony
A sequence
1 My Country in Darkness
After the wolves and before the elms
the Bardic Order ended in Ireland.
Only a few remained to continue
a dead art in a dying land:
This is a man
on the road from Youghal to Cahirmoyle.
He has no comfort, no food and no future.
He has no fire to recite his friendless measures by.
His riddles and flatteries will have no reward.
His patrons sheath their swords in Flanders and Madrid.
Reader of poems, lover of poetry –
in case you thought this was a gentle art,
follow this man on a moonless night
to the wretched bed he will have to make:
The Gaelic world stretches out under a hawthorn tree
and burns in the rain. This is its home,
its last frail shelter. All of it –
Limerick, the Wild Geese and what went before –
falters into cadence before he sleeps:
He shuts his eyes. Darkness falls on it.
2 The Harbour
This harbour was made by art and force.
And called Kingstown and afterwards Dun Laoghaire.
And holds the sea behind its barrier
less than five miles from my house.
Lord be with us say the makers of a nation.
Lord look down say the builders of a harbour.
They came and cut a shape out of ocean
and left stone to close around their labour.
Officers and their wives promenaded
on this spot once and saw with their own eyes
the opulent horizon and obedient skies
which nine-tenths of the law provided.
And frigates with thirty-six guns cruising
the outer edges of influence could idle
and enter here and catch the tide of
empire and arrogance and the Irish sea rising
and rising through a century of storms
and cormorants and moonlight the whole length of this coast,
while an ocean forgot an empire and the armed
ships under it changed: to slime weed and cold salt and rust.
City of shadows and of the gradual
capitulations to the last invader
this is the final one: signed in water
and witnessed in granite and ugly bronze and gun-metal.
And by me. I am your citizen: composed of
your fictions, your compromise, I am
a part of your story and its outcome.
And ready to record its contradictions.
3 Witness
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?
4 Daughters of Colony
Daughters of parsons and of army men.
Daughters of younger sons of younger sons.
Who left for London from Kingstown harbour –
never certain which they belonged to.
Who took their journals and their steamer trunks.
Who took their sketching books.
Who wore hats
made out of local straw
dried in an Irish field beside a river which
flowed to a town they had known in childhood,
and watched forever from their bedroom windows,
framed in the clouds and cloud-shadows,
the blotchy cattle and
the scattered window lamps of a flat landscape
they could not enter.
Would never enter.
I see the darkness coming.
The absurd smallness of the handkerchiefs
they are waving
as the shore recedes.
I put my words between them
and the silence
the failing light has consigned them to:
I also am a daughter of the colony.
I share their broken speech, their other-whereness.
No testament or craft of mine can hide
our presence
on the distaff side of history.
See: they pull the brims of their hats
down against a gust from the harbour.
They cover
their faces with what should have been
and never quite was: their home.
5 Imago
Head of a woman. Half-life of a nation.
Coarsely-cut blackthorn walking stick.
Old Tara brooch.
And bog oak.
A harp and a wolfhound on an ashtray.
All my childhood
I took you for the truth.
I see you now for what you are.
My ruthless images. My simulacra.
Anti-art. A foul skill
traded by history
to show a colony
the way to make pain a souvenir.
6 The Scar
Dawn on the river.
Dublin rises out of what reflects it.
Anna Liffey
looks to the east, to the sea,
her profile carved out by the light
on the old Carlisle bridge.
I was five
when a piece of glass
cut my head and left a scar.
Afterwards my skin felt different.
And still does on these autumn days when
the mist hides the city
from the Liffey.
The Liffey hides
the long ships, the muskets and the burning domes.
Everything but this momentary place.
And those versions of the Irish rain
which change the features
of a granite face.
If colony is a wound what will heal it?
After such injuries
what difference do we feel?
No answer in the air,
on the water, in the distance.
And yet
Emblem of this old,
torn and traded city,
altered by its river, its weather,
I turn to you as if there were.
One flawed head towards another.
7 City of Shadows
When I saw my father
buttoning his coat at Front Gate
I thought he would look like a man
who had lost what he had. And he did.
Grafton Street and Nassau Street were gone.
And the old parliament at College Green.
And the bronze arms and attitudes of orators
from Grattan to O’Connell. All gone.
We went to his car. He got in.
I waved my hands and motioned him to turn
his wheel towards the road to the only
straight route out to the coast.
When he did
I walked beside the car,
beside the kerb, and we made our way
in dark inches to the Irish Sea.
Then I smelled salt
and heard the foghorn.
And realised suddenly that I
had brought my father to his destination.
I walked home
alone to my flat.
The fog was lifting slowly. I thought
whatever the dawn made clear
and cast-iron and adamant again,
I would know from now on that in
a lost land of orators and pedestals
and corners and street names and rivers,
where even the ground underfoot
was hidden from view, there had been
one way out.
And I found it.
8 Unheroic
It was an Irish summer. It was wet.
It was a job. I was seventeen.
I set the clock and caught the bus at eight
and leaned my head against the misty window.
The city passed by. I got off
above the Liffey on a street of statues:
iron orators and granite patriots.
Arms wide. Lips apart. Last words.
I worked in a hotel. I carried trays.
I carried keys. I saw the rooms
when they were used and airless and again
when they were aired and ready and I stood
above the road and stared down at
silent eloquence and wet umbrellas.
There was a man who lived in the hotel.
He was a manager. I rarely saw him.
There was a rumour that he had a wound
from war or illness – no one seemed sure –
which would not heal. And when he finished
his day of ledgers and telephones he went
up the back stairs to his room
to dress it. I never found out
where it was. Someone said in his thigh.
Someone else said deep in his side.
He was a quiet man. He spoke softly.
I saw him once or twice on the stairs
at the back of the building by the laundry.
Once I waited, curious to see him.
Mostly I went home. I got my coat
and walked bare-headed to the river
past the wet, bronze and unbroken skin
of those who learned their time and knew their country.
How do I know my country? Let me tell you
it has been hard to do. And when I do
go back to difficult knowledge, it is not
to that street or those men raised
high above the certainties they stood on –
Ireland hero history – but how
I went behind the linen room and up
the stone stairs and climbed to the top.
And stood for a moment there, concealed
by shadows. In a hiding place.
Waiting to see.
Wanting to look again.
Into the patient face of the unhealed.
9 The Colonists
I am ready to go home
through an autumn evening.
Suddenly,
without any warning, I can see them.
They form slowly out of the twilight.
Their faces. Arms. Greatcoats. And tears.
They are holding maps.
But the pages are made of failing daylight.
Their tears, made of dusk, fall across the names.
Although they know by heart
every inch and twist of the river
which runs through this town, and their houses –
every aspect of the light their windows found –
they cannot find where they come from:
The river is still there.
But not their town.
The light is there. But not their moment in it.
Nor their memories. Nor the signs of life they made.
Then they faded.
And the truth is I never saw them.
If I had I would have driven home
through an ordinary evening, knowing
that not one street name or sign or neighbourhood
could be trusted
to the safe-keeping
of the making and unmaking of a people.
And have entered a house I might never
find again, and have written down –
as I do now –
their human pain. Their ghostly weeping.
10 A Dream of Colony
I dreamed we came to an iron gate.
And leaned against it.
It opened.
We heard it grinding slowly over gravel.
We began to walk.
When we started talking
I saw our words had the rare power
to unmake history:
Gradually the elms beside us
shook themselves into leaves.
And laid out under us their undiseased shadows.
Each phrase of ours,
holding still for a moment in the stormy air,
raised an unburned house
at the end of an avenue of elder and willow.
Unturned that corner
the assassin eased around and aimed from.
Undid. Unsaid:
Once. Fire. Quick. Over there.
The scarred granite healed in my sleep.
The thundery air became sweet again.
We had come to the top of the avenue.
I heard laughter and forgotten consonants.
I saw greatcoats and epaulettes.
I turned to you –
but who are you?
Before I woke I heard a woman’s voice cry out.
It was hoarse with doubt.
She was saying,
I was saying –
What have we done?
11 A Habitable Grief
Long ago
I was a child in a strange country:
I was Irish in England.
I learned
a second language there
which has stood me in good stead –
the lingua franca of a lost land.
A dialect in which
what had never been could still be found.
That infinite horizon. Always far
and impossible. That contrary passion
to be whole.
This is what language is:
a habitable grief. A turn of speech
for the everyday and ordinary abrasion
of losses such as this
which hurts
just enough to be a scar.
And heals just enough to be a nation.
12 The Mother Tongue
The old pale ditch can still be seen
less than half a mile from my house –
its ancient barrier of mud and brambles
which mireth next unto Irishmen
is now a mere rise of coarse grass,
a rowan tree and some thinned-out spruce,
where a child is playing at twilight.
I stand in the shadows. I find it
hard to believe now that once
this was a source of our division:
Dug. Drained. Shored up and left
to keep out and keep in. That here
the essence of a colony’s defence
was the substance of the quarrel with its purpose:
Land. Ground. A line drawn in rain
and clay and the roots of wild broom –
behind it the makings of a city,
beyond it rumours of a nation –
by Dalkey and Kilternan and Balally
through two ways of saying their names.
A window is suddenly yellow.
A woman is calling a child.
She turns from her play and runs to her name.
Who came here under cover of darkness
from Glenmalure and the Wicklow hills<
br />
to the limits of this boundary? Who whispered
the old names for love to this earth
and anger and ownership as it opened
the abyss of their future at their feet?
I was born on this side of the Pale.
I speak with the forked tongue of colony.
But I stand in the first dark and frost
of a winter night in Dublin and imagine
my pure sound, my undivided speech
travelling to the edge of this silence.
As if to find me. And I listen: I hear
what I am safe from. What I have lost.
II The Lost Land
The Lost Land
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.
