because it never was, never once, but then
how to explain that sometimes I can hear
the river in those first days of April, making
its way through the dusk, having learned
to speak the way I once spoke, saying
as if I didn't love you,as if I wouldn't have died for you.

from The Room in Which My First Child Slept by Eavan Boland
Source: Poetry (October 2006).

***

I have fallen in love with this poem. Go immediately to Poetry and read it in its entirety.

Sundays with the poets :: at home in Ireland

Everything in me
Wanted to bow down, to offer up,
To go barefoot, foetal and penitential
And pray at the water's edge.

from Triptych III At the Water's Edge, Field Work
by Seamus Heaney

This October I'm writing every day on being at home in Ireland. But on Sundays I'll be sharing the words of others... with pictures that, of course, will never do their words justice.

Sundays with the poets :: At home in Ireland

I never saw a man who looked

      With such a wistful eye

Upon that little tent of blue

      Which prisoners call the sky,

And at every drifting cloud that went

      With sails of silver by.

From The Ballad of Reading Gaol
by Oscar Wilde

This October I'm writing every day on being at home in Ireland. But on Sundays I'll be sharing the words of others... with pictures that, of course, will never do their words justice.

Sundays with the poets :: At home in Ireland

Pilgrims smiled at one another:
How good God was,
How much a loving Father!
How wonderful the punishing stones were!
Another hour and the boats will sail
Into the port of Time.
Are you not glad you came?

from Lough Derg
Patrick Kavanagh

***

This October I'm writing every day on being at home in Ireland. But on Sundays I'll be sharing the words of others... with pictures that, of course, will never do their words justice.