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Heroic

1944 –

2020

Sex and history. And skin and bone.
And the oppression of Sunday afternoon.
Bells called the faithful to devotion.

I was still at school and on my own.
And walked and walked and sheltered from the rain.

The patriot was made of drenched stone.
His lips were still speaking. The gun
he held had just killed someone.

I looked up. And looked at him again.
He stared past me without recognition.

I moved my lips and wondered how the rain
would taste if my tongue were made of stone.
And wished it was. And whispered so that no one
could hear it but him. Make me a heroine.

Eavan Boland was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1944. One of Ireland's preeminent contemporary poets, she is the author of A Poet's Dublin (Carcanet Press, 2014) and A Women Without a Country (W. W. Norton, 2014), among others. She died on April 27, 2020.

Themes

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More by this poet

Domestic Violence

It was winter, lunar, wet. At dusk
Pewter seedlings became moonlight orphans.
Pleased to meet you meat to please you
said the butcher's sign in the window in the village.

Eavan Boland

2018

Amethyst Beads


And when I take them out of
the cherrywood box these beads are
the colour of dog-violets in shadow. Then
at the well of the throat where
tears start
they darken. Now I wear at my neck an old stress
of crystal: an impression of earthly housekeeping.
A mysterious brightness
made underground where there is no sun
only stories of a strayed child and her mother bargaining
with a sullen king. Promising and arguing: 
what she can keep, what she can let him have.

Eavan Boland

2013

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.

Eavan Boland

2008

Poems

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Heroic

More by this poet

Domestic Violence

Amethyst Beads

Quarantine

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