A little bit of Culture...  Poetry from soc.culture.irish

Poetry of Ireland  (Irish poets writing in English)

Posted by K E Dennis
on:    September 2000

The thought of Dionysian & Apollonian natures reminded me of a poem - or rather, two poems: the first by the marvellous Eavan Boland, & the second [posted separately] by the incomparable Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.

Daphne With Her Thighs In Bark
Eavan Boland

An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems, 1967-1987
New York:  W. W. Norton & Co., 1996

I have written this

so that,
in the next myth,
my sister will be wiser.

Let her learn from me:

the opposite of passion
is not virtue
but routine.

I can be cooking,
making coffee,
scrubbing wood, perhaps,
and back it comes:
the crystalline, the otherwhere,
the wood

where I was
when he began the chase.
And how I ran from him!

Pan-thighed,
satyr-faced he was.

The trees reached out to me.
I silvered and I quivered. I shook out
My foil of quick leaves.

He snouted past.
What a fool I was!

I shall be here forever,
setting out the tea,
among the coppers and the branching alloys and
the tin shine of this kitchen;
laying saucers on the pine table.

Save face, sister.
Fall. Stumble.
Rut with him.
His rough heat will keep you warm and

you will be better off than me,
with your memories
down the garden,
at the start of March,

unable to keep your eyes
off the chestnut tree -

just the way
it thrusts and hardens.


--- The End ---

Questions? Comments? -K. E. Dennis

Poetry of Ireland   (Irish poets writing in English)

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