#eavand aisling boland

[goneahead]

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

#eavan boland #eavand aisling boland #irish poetry #women poets #goneahead reblog