Irish Poetry
For Michael Hartnett
We always knew there was no Orpheus in Ireland.
No music stored at the doors of hell.
No god to make it.
No wild beasts to weep and lie down to it.
But I remember and evening when the sky
was underworld-dark at four,
when ice had seized every part of the city
and we sat talking—
the air making a wreath for our cups of tea.
And you began to speak of our own gods.
Our heartbroken pantheon.
No attic light for them and no Herodotus.
But thin rain and dogfish and the stopgap
of the sharp cliffs
they spent their winters on.
by Eavan Boland
from Coe Review, Volume 35, 2009