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By Eavan Boland

I have two daughters.


They are all I ever wanted from the earth.


Or almost all.


I also wanted one piece of ground:


One city trapped by hills. One urban river.
An island in its element.


So I could say mine. My own.
And mean it.


Now they are grown up and far away


and memory itself
has become an emigrant,
wandering in a place
where love dissembles itself as landscape:


Where the hills
are the colours of a child's eyes,
where my children are distances, horizons:


At night,
on the edge of sleep,


I can see the shore of Dublin Bay.
Its rocky sweep and its granite pier.


Is this, I say
how they must have seen it,
backing out on the mailboat at twilight,


shadows falling
on everything they had to leave?
And would love forever?
And then


I imagine myself
at the landward rail of that boat
searching for the last sight of a hand.


I see myself
on the underworld side of that water,
the darkness coming in fast, saying
all the names I know for a lost land:


Ireland. Absence. Daughter.


“The Lost Land” from THE LOST LAND by Eavan Boland. Copyright ©1998 by Eavan Boland. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Source: The Lost Land (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1998)

  • Living
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Poet Bio

Eavan Boland
Questions of identity— as an Irish woman, mother, poet, and exile— give rise to much of Eavan Boland’s poetry. She was born in Dublin, but grew up in London, where anti-Irish racism gave her a strong sense of her heritage. Irish history and myth also figure prominently in her work. The author of eight collections of poetry, she was also a professor of English at Stanford University. See More By This Poet

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By Eavan Boland

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