Eavan Boland

“This is what language is:a habitual grief. A turn of speechfor the everyday and ordinary abrasionof losses such as this:which hurtsjust enough to be a scarAnd heals just enough to be a nation.”

“. . . We love fog becauseit shifts old anomalies into the elementssurrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing”

“I began to watch places with an interest so exact it might have been memory. There was that street corner, with the small newsagent which sold copies of the Irish Independent and honeycomb toffee in summer. I could imagine myself there, a child of nine, buying peppermints and walking back down by the canal, the lock brown and splintered as ever, and boys diving from it. It became a powerful impulse, a slow intense reconstruction of a childhood which had never happened. A fragrance or a trick of light was enough. Or a house I entered which I wanted not just to appreciate but to remember, and then I would begin.”

“Lines written for a thirtieth wedding anniversarySomewhere up in the eaves it began:high in the roof – in a sort of vaultbetween the slates and the gutter – a small leak.Through it, rain which came from the east,in from the lights and foghorns of the coast – water with a ghost of ocean salt in it – spilled down on the path below.Over and over and overyears stone began to alter,its grain searched out, worn in:granite rounding down, giving waytaking into its own inertia that information water brought, of ships,wings, fog and phosphor in the harbour.It happened under our lives: the rain,the stone. We hardly noticed. Nowthis is the day to think of it, to wonder:all those years, all those years together –the stars in a frozen arc overhead,the quick noise of a thaw in the air,the blue stare of the hills – through it allthis constancy: what wears, what endures.”

“Child of our time, our times have robbed your cradle. Sleep in a world your final sleep has woken.”

“Love will healWhat language fails to know”

“The Pomegranate The only legend I have ever loved isthe story of a daughter lost in hell.And found and rescued there.Love and blackmail are the gist of it.Ceres and Persephone the names.And the best thing about the legend isI can enter it anywhere. And have.As a child in exile ina city of fogs and strange consonants,I read it first and at first I wasan exiled child in the crackling dusk ofthe underworld, the stars blighted. LaterI walked out in a summer twilightsearching for my daughter at bed-time.When she came running I was readyto make any bargain to keep her.I carried her back past whitebeamsand wasps and honey-scented buddleias.But I was Ceres then and I knewwinter was in store for every leafon every tree on that road.Was inescapable for each one we passed.And for me. It is winterand the stars are hidden.I climb the stairs and stand where I can seemy child asleep beside her teen magazines,her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.The pomegranate! How did I forget it?She could have come home and been safeand ended the story and allour heart-broken searching but she reachedout a hand and plucked a pomegranate.She put out her hand and pulled downthe French sound for apple and the noise of stone and the proofthat even in the place of death,at the heart of legend, in the midstof rocks full of unshed tearsready to be diamonds by the timethe story was told, a child can behungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance.The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured.The suburb has cars and cable television.The veiled stars are above ground.It is another world. But what elsecan a mother give her daughter but suchbeautiful rifts in time?If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.The legend will be hers as well as mine. She will enter it. As I have.She will wake up. She will holdthe papery flushed skin in her hand.And to her lips. I will say nothing.”