Diane posted a wonderful ekphrastic poem from Eavan Boland last week. I’m feeling a bit Irish and wistful this week, so I’m going to continue on that path and post another Boland poem here. (I featured her “Irish Interior” in March.)
While celebrating the Fourth at my in-laws’ house this week, I looked over the shoulder of my brother-in-law as he flipped through a scrapbook I’d made for our 1996 family trip to Ireland. (When my father-in-law retired as a Delta pilot, he took the whole fam, little bitties and all, over to Dublin for his final commercial flight.)
This afternoon, I’ve been working on some art involving Celtic knots. Whenever I make relief prints, I have to play Celtic music on Pandora as I carve, and sometimes when I draw. I want my art to have movement and life, and if you don’t feel movement and life while listening to Celtic music, you might want to check your pulse.
Anyway, hence my need to read and share a bit more of Eavan Boland. The poem below particularly appealed to me because we’ve just had an afternoon of welcome “summer rain,” and also because I’ve been collecting all kinds of rusty-ish, old objects and scrap pieces of metal for other art projects, haunting antique stores and Etsy vintage shops and the good old ground. So the discovery of an old coin was right up my alley this week.
And don’t you love the title?
House of Shadows. Home of Simile
by Eavan Boland
One afternoon of summer rain
my hand skimmed a shelf and I found
an old florin. Ireland, 1950.
We say like or as and the world is
a fish minted in silver and alloy,
an outing for all the children,
an evening in the Sandford cinema,
a paper cone of lemonade crystals and
say it again so we can see
androgyny of angels, edges to a circle,
the way the body works against the possible— …
Please click here here to read the rest.
It won’t cost you a florin or even two cents to indulge in more great poetry – just check out The Opposite of Indifference, where wonderful Tabatha has the Poetry Friday Roundup this week.