AN IRISH POET DIES

A poet I have never heard of, but one of Ireland’s best and a woman at that, died April 27, 2020.

She had just returned from her long-time teaching position at Stanford University in California to wait out the coronavirus pandemic in her native Dublin. She was 75.

EAVAN BOLAND was not only a very fine poet, but was instrumental in bringing the hidden voices of women poets in Ireland out into the open.  This poem is very apt for our time here and now.

"Quarantine"

In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking — they were both walking — north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.

                                   "Quarantine" is from "New Collected Poems"   released by WW Norton.