SHELF LIFE

The Lost Land

January/February 1999

Reading time min

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 author is a professor of English. Excerpted from The Lost Land by Eavan Boland. Copyright 1998 by Eavan Boland. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton and Company Inc.

Trending Stories

  1. Palm Pilots

    The university

  2. 8 Tips for Forgiving Someone Who Hurt You

    Advice & Insights

  3. The Huberman Effect

    Science

  4. Should We Abolish the Electoral College?

    Law/Public Policy/Politics

  5. How to Find Your People

    Advice & Insights

You May Also Like

© Stanford University. Stanford, California 94305.