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#eavan boland
lillyli-74 · 4 months
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..and no one to tell us, now or ever, why it ends, why it always ends.
~Eavan Boland
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apoemaday · 6 months
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Nocturne
by Eavan Boland
After a friend has gone I like the feel of it: The house at night. Everyone asleep. The way it draws in like atmosphere or evening.
One-o-clock. A floral tea pot and a raisin scone. A tray waits to be taken down. The landing light is off. The clock strikes. The cat
comes into his own, mysterious on the stairs, a black ambivalence around the legs of button-back chairs, an insinuation to be set beside
the red spoon and the salt-glazed cup, the saucer with the thick spill of tea which scalds off easily under the tap. Time
is a tick, a purr, a drop. The spider on the dining room window has fallen asleep among complexities as I will once
the doors are bolted and the keys tested and the switch turned up of the kitchen light which made outside in the garden
an electric room--a domestication of closed daisies, an architecture instant and improbable.
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adrasteiax · 1 year
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(...) they gave their sorrow a name and drowned it.
Eavan Boland, from Atlantis - A Lost Sonnet in “Domestic Violence: Poems”  
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violettesiren · 2 months
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I was born in a place where rain is second nature, where a hooded coat, ready on the hook, was never out of reach. Nor do I believe like Plato, or even his late revisionists, that landscape is the corporeal purpose of our minds. I always knew rain was a dialect I could listen to on a winter night: its sibilance. even now, on a wet evening, I watch as twilight comes to the old graveyard above the main road of our village and I am glad for whoever lies there that this elemental companion has not, and never will, abandon them.
Rain by Eavan Boland
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goneahead · 11 days
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Inheritance
I have been wondering what I have to leave behind, to give my daughters.
No good offering the view between here and Three Rock Mountain, the blueness in the hours before rain, the long haze afterwards. The ground I stood on was never really mine. It might not ever be theirs.
And gifts that were passed through generations— silver and the fluid light left after silk—were never given here. This is an island of waters, inland distances, with a history of want and women who struggled to make the nothing which was all they had into something they could leave behind.
I learned so little from them: the lace bobbin with its braided mesh, its oat-straw pillow and the wheat-colored shawl knitted in one season to imitate another
are all crafts I never had and can never hand on. But then again there was a night I stayed awake, alert and afraid, with my first child who turned and turned; sick, fretful.
When dawn came I held my hand over the absence of fever, over skin which had stopped burning, as if I knew the secrets of health and air, as if I understood them
and listened to the silence and thought, I must have learned that somewhere.
~~Eavan Boland
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cor-ardens-archive · 2 years
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Diana Wallace quoting Mary Wollstonecraft | Virginia Woolf | Eavan Boland
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hallohartje · 5 months
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Amber
It never mattered that there was once a vast grieving:
trees on their hillsides, in their groves, weeping— a plastic gold dropping
through seasons and centuries to the ground— until now.
On this fine September afternoon from which you are absent I am holding, as if my hand could store it, an ornament of amber
you once gave me.
Reason says this: The dead cannot see the living. The living will never see the dead again.
The clear air we need to find each other in is gone forever, yet
this resin once collected seeds, leaves and even small feathers as it fell and fell
which now in a sunny atmosphere seem as alive as they ever were
as though the past could be present and memory itself a Baltic honey—
a chafing at the edges of the seen, a showing off of just how much can be kept safe
inside a flawed translucence.
-- Eavan Boland
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elskanellis · 11 months
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This Moment
Eavan Boland A neighborhood. At dusk. Things are getting ready to happen out of sight. Stars and moths. And rinds slanting around fruit. But not yet. One tree is black. One window is yellow as butter. A woman leans down to catch a child who has run into her arms this moment. Stars rise. Moths flutter. Apples sweeten in the dark.
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riverbird · 1 year
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"At what point does an actual, exact landscape—those details which are recurrent and predictable—begin to blur and soften? Sometimes on a summer evening, walking between my house and a neighbor’s, past the whitebeam trees and the bicycles left glinting in the dusk, I could imagine that I myself was a surreal and changing outline, that there was something almost profound in these reliable shadows, that such lives as mine and my neighbors’ were mythic, not because of their strangeness but because of their powerful ordinariness."
Eavan Boland, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time
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somelemonpeels · 4 months
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A Woman Painted on a Leaf
A Woman Painted on a Leaf
Eavan Boland
I found it among curios and silver. In the pureness of wintry light.
A woman painted on a leaf.
Fine lines drawn on a veined surface In a handmade frame.
This is not my face. Neither did I draw it.
A leaf falls in a garden. The moon cools its aftermath of sap. The pith of summer dries out in starlight.
A woman is inscribed there.
This is not death. It is the terrible Suspension of life.
I want a poem I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in.
I want to take
This dried-out face, As you take a starling from behind iron, And return it to its element of air, Of ending–
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.
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lunamarish · 11 months
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L’alba
E’ questa l’ora che amo l’ora intermedia, né di qui né di là. E’ questo il momento in cui lavoro meglio salgo le scale in due stati d’animo, in due mondi lasciando giù qualcosa, prendendo con me qualcosa. L’ora del cambiamento della metamorfosi, delle instabilità che mutano forma. E io vedo ciò che posso diventare.
Eavan Boland
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lillyli-74 · 2 years
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Photography by Gina Iacob
Night; an oratory of dark, a chapel of unreason.
~Eavan Boland
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child-in-her-eyes · 1 year
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adrasteiax · 1 year
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Eavan Boland, from Falling Asleep To The Sound of Rain in “Domestic Violence: Poems”  
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violettesiren · 7 months
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At twilight in the shadow of the poplars the children found a swarm of wild bees.
It was late summer and I knew as they came shouting in that, yes, this evening had been singled out by
a finger pointing at trees, the inland feel of that greenness, the sugar-barley iron of a garden chair
ad children still bramble-height and fretful from the heat and a final brightness stickle-backing that particular
patch of grass across which light was short-lived and elegiac as the view from a train window of
a station parting, all tears. And this— this I thought, is how it will have been chosen from those summer evenings
which under the leaves of the poplars— striped dun and ochre, simmering over the stashed-up debris of old seasons—
a swarm of wild bees is making use of.
We Are Human History. We Are Not Natural History. by Eavan Boland
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goneahead · 11 days
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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. 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.
~~Eavan Boland
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